About?
: I wouldn’t buy About. Not that I could afford it but… If you were starting About.com today, you wouldn’t create a centralized marketplace of cheap content; you wouldn’t hire a bunch of people (even at serf wages) to create the content. Instead, it would make much more sense to start a network of distributed media (yes, blogs): less cost, less risk, greater scale, greater diversity, stronger voice of the people….
I’ve said this to the man who started About and the man who bought it last time and they didn’t kick me in the shins.
PaidContent.org says The New York Times is the frontrunner to buy About. That makes sense if you’re a centralized marketplace of content trying to maintain that model, if you or your owners are scared of the distributed world. But the centralized marketplace — the channel, the portal, the conglomerate — is the thing of the past. Things of the past often buy each other when the past arrives.
