Since I’ve been down and out, I chose the latest source, which is from a financially focused publication.
Here’s the news: About.com Grabs Net Deal Spotlight.
A quote from this story at TheStreet.com : “With trends like that, it’s no surprise that companies reportedly kicking the tires of About.com, according to The New York Times, include New York Times (NYT:NYSE – news – research) itself, Yahoo!, Google (GOOG:Nasdaq – news – research), Time Warner (TWX:NYSE – news – research) and Ask Jeeves (ASKJ:Nasdaq – news – research).
A Primedia spokesman declined to comment.
About.com, launched in 1997 as The Mining Company, was envisioned as a vehicle for inexpensively building up targeted content on the Internet, against which advertising could be sold on a relatively inexpensive, decentralized basis. Subject matter of interest to Internet users was assembled and updated by a network of experts — independent contractors who published their work under the unifying artistic direction, editorial supervision and Internet address of About.com. Nowadays, About.com comprises hundreds of subsites devoted to special interests ranging from attention deficit disorder to zoology.”
And now for my own wild theories and speculation.
Of the online company bidders, it seems to me that the top contenders are Yahoo, Google and AOl (under that AOL Time Warner umbrella.) I’m no expert on the money side of it, but it seems they all have the cash… I’m interested in these three because of my own speculations on what could happen if one of them get it.
Let’s say AOL gets About.com. Hm. I kind of have a love/hate thing going with AOL. I love that they are the ones who helped me jump from accessing the early web on terminals to using my Dad’s Mac to search. But in Aol’s maturity, I feel like they’ve made thing sso simple that they’re hard. Much like Microsoft, they give me too many ways to do one thing, when what I really want is one thing that works consistently.
I know, I know. AOL’s signature feature is their ability to “dumb down” the web for us common folk. But thinking of a dumbed-down version of About.com gives me the willies. About.com with a bunch of useless widgets on it that I don’t want?
Pass. I use AOL to connect when I travel, and to use AIM. There should be a better option for just that than this byoa deal that they have (a standing for access).
So what if Yqahoo gets it? They’ll probably add it to their portal in some way. That would be great if they re-catalog their RSS feeds and blogs into a more on-demand way.
About.com in my Yahoo toolbar? Yum.Maybe Yahoo will make my dream browser with Firefox…
But I digress.
The point is, I think About.com would be safe in their hands, and maybe get the Yahoo portal slapped on the front-end with the backend still pretty much the same but slowly evolving.
Now what if my first love, Google, grabs a hold of About? I think the Google Ads will move to some slightly more premium ad space, and they’ll pretty much leave it the way it wants to be, but with Money.
And that’s what I want to see, someone who will say ” here’s a chunk of money, here’s some serious full time dollars for your guides so they don’t go anywhere, and just let us know if you need anything.” I pray whoever ends up with this great web resource won’t mess to much with this good thing.
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