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AOL founder Steve Case has officially launched the health care portal RevolutionHealth this Thursday, in a bid to challenge the market leader WebMD for a piece of the multibillion dollar pharmaceutical ad market.

Revolution Health is different from health search engines like Healthline and Medstory in a way that it does not make users search for health related issues but rather enable them to ask about such issues on the community portal-its actually a health related social network.

The free site includes information on health issues, conditions and diseases, and also has a personal page builder using which all users could create their profiles, link to other users and set personal health care goals. Users can also create pages to outline the risks of suffering from particular diseases and their remedies and can rate doctors, hospitals or health care services and check symptoms for potential causes. Revolution Health also has a place for users to keep their medical records and maintain an ongoing relationship with their doctors, as well as widgets to track their health even from personal blogs.

The site has created a lot of tools to help people become healthier, such as the Lose one pound tool that shows how long an activity should be done in order to lose a pound of flesh, or the Cigarette cost tool that shows you how much money you will be saving if you quit smoking.

The page building features in Revolution Health are a result of their acquisition of CarePages, a service that allowed users to create personal and private web pages to share with family friends and doctors and monitor each others health. Revolution Health’s care pages are seen as a key differentiator between the site and its competitors like WebMD and Yahoo Health. Another important difference is the lack of ads, mainly from pharmaceutical companies, although Revolution Health do plan to incorporate ads into the site eventually. They will also be selling memberships and earn revenue through their store as well as through affiliate programs by providing Insurance company information on the site.

Health care advertisement is a huge market, with top 13 pharmaceutical companies spending nearly $14 billion in marketing and prescription and over-the-counter medicines in 2005, according to TNS Media Intelligence and Advertising Age. Although currently less that 5% of these marketing dollars are spent online, the figure is likely to soar as more robust health care sites with authoritative content come online.

WebMD posted revenues of around $254 million in 2006, up 50% from the previous year. WebMD has capitalized on its early mover advantage to offer private health care portals to corporations, which account for nearly 21% of its net revenues. Competitors like Revolution Health will definitely find it hard to get into the private portal space effectively, however the market over all is big enough for a few players to prosper.