
New York Times Set to Sell About.com for $270 Million to Answers.com - iProject
http://allthingsd.com/20120808/the-new-york-times-is-about-to-say-goodbye-to-about-com/
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lrs
Unreal. How can such an awful website have $270 million on hand, and how can
they be willing to spend it on another awful website?

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ahi
They don't have $270 million on hand. They are looking for financing.

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lrs
Whoops, my mistake - thanks for the correction.

Still baffled by how answers.com expects to get $270M of financing to buy
about.com. To anyone who has ever clicked a link to either of those domains
from a Google query, the headline must seem Onion-like.

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eriktrautman
I hope these awful SEO-bait sites keep consolidating so they can eventually
fade away into history. I've never gotten a useful answer from either site,
just bombarded with ads and filler text. Quora and Wikipedia should be more
than enough to fill that entire space (assuming Quora can keep up the quality
as it gets more and more mainstream).

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AznHisoka
I know Yahoo Answers has a lot of spam but there's some gems in there that
Quora doesn't have. Especially casual questions and questions related to sex.

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debacle
This is a huge deal. Historically, about.com was an excellent reference, but
with the advent of wikipedia and, in my opinion, the general decline in
quality of about.com authorship, it was easy to ignore them.

Hopefully Answers.com can revitalize their unique editorial model, but I'm not
really holding my breath.

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AznHisoka
It's not about Wikipedia. It's about the declining ROI on online publishing,
and the effect of Google Panda on their bottom line. Historically, noone
visited about.com for reference on a topic.. they just stumbled upon it when
they saw it ranking #1 for a keyword.

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trg2
About.com is the "for dummies" books of search results. Mediocre information
on a wide vaiety of topics. It's kind of like a unisex salon in a one-horse
town. You don't want to go, but it's there, so many do by default.

Quora, please, please send Answers / About to a spot in the late 90's
graveyard next to Pets.com.

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salimmadjd
Anyone remembers the price About was sold several years back? I recall another
private equity who bought it and then flipped it for bunch of profits.

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djahng
It says in the article About was bought by the New York Times for $410 million
in 2005.

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caycep
hopefully getting rid of needless costs too. I don't know anyone who uses this

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the_wanderer
more ads than content. where is the value?

