IAC Has Bought About.com From The New York Times For $300M In Cash

[Brett_Tabke]

$300 million acquisition price includes About.com, ConsumerSearch.com and CalorieCount.com and the deal will close in the next several weeks. Full release below.

Both AllThingsD and Reuters have reported a deal in the works, and we have now confirmed with a source very close to the situation that IAC is buying About.com from the New York Times Company for an all-cash sum in the region of $300 million. TechCrunch has also learned that the news is due to be made official either later tonight or tomorrow morning.

The source also confirmed that although Answers.com had also been interested in the information portal, its offer — reportedly valued at $270 million — was in debt and equity in Answers.com. [techcrunch.com...]

[incrediBILL]

People still use about.com?

[martinibuster]

Ranks well.

[bill]

I always cringe when I end up there. No telling how old some of that info is...

[scooterdude]

I use it :)

[sunny_kat]

I still use it at times as a source of information

[celgins]

I always cringe when I end up there. No telling how old some of that info is...

I always assume it's outdated content and leave.

[Brett_Tabke]

I still use About.com fairly regularly. There is some good info in there and almost always some good links to other reading.

[Leosghost]

There is some good info in there

Usually taken from elsewhere, by someone who doesn't personally know what they are writing about, I'd rather use the original content's producers website..same applies to ehow and the other human powered scrapers..

[Panthro]

I guess it's better than ehow

[travelin cat]

I have never found anything useful at about.com. It's a poor compilation of other peoples incorrect answers on every subject I have searched for.

[msantore]

still ranks well for many terms.

[beerSEO]

I've got links on about.com ;)

[scooterdude]

About.com has yet to let me down, Professionally edited content, By qualified folk, and always to the point

Without SEO overloading

And the writers are present, and update their content, I know, having exchanged posts with them.

Anyway, all our mileages will differ :)

[rankmaster77]

I like them, use them now and then.

[martinibuster]

Usually taken from elsewhere, by someone who doesn't personally know what they are writing about...

No, no, no. That's incorrect. That might be true for sites like eHow or Wikipedia but that is not true for About.com. About.com is authoritative, head and shoulders more authoritative than Wikipedia. On About.com you can verify the credentials of the authors. About.com content is solid. I would rather see that in SERPs instead of Google's crutch, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not authoritative.

Take a moment to visit the site. About.com lists the authors/guides and their qualifications. Most if not all the contributors there are qualified to write on the topics they curate. Here's the bio for the web design and marketing guide [webdesign.about.com]:

Jennifer Kyrnin has been a professional web developer and has been assisting others to learn web Design, HTML, CSS, and XML since 1995...

Jennifer has maintained sites of over 5000 pages on a large corporate websites, smaller small business websites, and tiny personal web pages and blogs, as well as several intranet and extranet sites. She has also worked as a contract Web designer on numerous sites. She has worked with nearly every web technology including XML, CMS, HTML, PHP, Perl, C, JavaScript, Ruby, and Java.

Jennifer has written three books about the Internet, including two on web design and HTML. Her most recent book is about building HTML5 web applications for mobile devices.

[Leosghost]

Some one scraped one of my sites a few years back, and put a "piece" using what they read up on "about.com"..contained a deliberate small factual inaccuracy on my part in my original text ..rather like map makers use with non existent streets :)..

They never spotted it, just copied and re-wrote it, leaving the factual error intact, along with everything else they took..nor did they link to me as their "source"..

It was not in web design :)

[Andem]

+1 martinibuster.

About.com definitely is far more reliable than the likes of Wikipedia and its gang of self-righteous power editors. I don't think it's fair to compare About.com to eHow, either.

On the whole, though, I wouldn't really consider everything they publish to be authoritative though some editors really do put a huge amount of work into what they write.

[incrediBILL]

some good links to other reading

More often than not when I tried to use About.com many of the sites they linked to had even older out of date content or the pages were soft-404s.

I gave up trying to use 'em years ago.

[WebPixie]

No, no, no. That's incorrect. That might be true for sites like eHow or Wikipedia but that is not true for About.com. About.com is authoritative, head and shoulders more authoritative than Wikipedia. On About.com you can verify the credentials of the authors. About.com content is solid. I would rather see that in SERPs instead of Google's crutch, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not authoritative.

About.com is a better source than Wiki and eHow, but at least when Wiki and eHow copy my content they sometimes link back to our site. We have seen a few examples of About rewriting our content, not linking to us and then out ranking us.

Basically it depends on the author. Some of them are experts in their niche and seem to do everything above board others not so much.

But I think the $300m will end up cheap if Google continues to show as much to About as it has recently. In a few niches I follow About dominating the results.

[Rajeshseo]

I never use about.com information.

[backdraft7]

what's useable on those sites? They're nothing but poorly written, one shot articles whose sole purpose is to get ad clicks on exit. They were smart to dump it for 300 mil. now if the buyer is smart, they'll shut it down.

[moTi]

never ever landed on about.com. according to "google trends", they solely attract native english speaking countries. totally irrelevant in the rest of the world.

[honestman]

One of those very annoying sites where you have to drill down 20 levels to get to any info, and the pages are absolutely crammed with ads such that determining the content from the ads is not easy. There are some good writers, but the template they use, which I would have thought would be a prime Panda target, is full of very thin content that rarely goes deep. Nothing wrong with pointing to other authoritative links, but why do you have to go down so many levels (to increase their page count per visit?) to get information?

[potentialgeek]

Here's the original WW thread when NYT bought About.com in 2005:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Brett wrote:

"Shake head - this is one I just don't get. Seems to be a play from the bubble playbook than one from web reality 2005. That price is very impressive - hats off to the about.com gang - polish the resumes."

About.com survived Panda last year, but it's been losing traffic steadily since Jan. 1, 2012.

I've only used About a few times in a decade.