About About
: PaidContent is all over The New York Times’ $410 million acquisition of About.com.
: FRIDAY UPDATE: Rex Hammock does the math: $820k per blog.
4 responses to “About About”
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The NYT paid the equivalent of buying 10 new 737’s for a website? Are the water pipes in Manhattan lined with lead?
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Considering how useless About.com has been since, oh, about 1998, this seems almost completely beyond reason. About.com’s whole business model was early-Yahoo!’s human-based directory with extra content and ‘experts’ who compiled linklists. Google has made them almost completely irrelevant.
(anyone else remember when they were MiningCo.com?)
Looks like poor judgement at the Grey Lady runs deeper than I’d feared. -
Somejoe’s reaction surprises me, I was going to liken all the anxiety about the Web over there at The Manhattan Real Estate Bubble Promotional Newsletter to the anxiety over going color. It seems natural and right. I disagree about About: the experts in my areas of interest–like language learning, for example–are very good and well worth adding to the feed reader. If you’re a Web-savvy high school student looking for help on Spanish, it’s a good destination. I’m sure that’s true of a lot of subjects. And the guides are very responsive, they like to get mail and interact with the readership. I’m no expert on the business side, I’m just saying About has a nice user experience that steers expertly between the two extremes of flame wars in the forums and no interactivity at all. That’s been a problem for the Times, I think.
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Call me mercenary, but for $820,000, yes, I’d sell my blog. Any buyers?
