The changing of the guards has finally happened over at Primedia -

They sold off the major web content portal About.com to NY Times:

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3484211

The changing of the guards has finally happened over at Primedia -

They sold off the major web content portal About.com to NY Times:

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3484211
The interesting part of this is that the story has been in the NYC papers for the past week and no-one really thought it worth posting here...
Elisabeth you are the keeper of record... it should have been noticed and commented on... and even once posted no-one has commented!

Hard to say where it will end up but I think this is very big news. Can an SE be far behind?

Regardless of whether NYTd acquires a search engine (the only one of the big four they could afford would be Jeeves), this obviously entrenches them as a key player in the PPC contextual advertising market.

Regardless of whether NYTd acquires a search engine (the only one of the big four they could afford would be Jeeves), this obviously entrenches them as a key player in the PPC contextual advertising market.
This is the speculation I was thinking about.... they definitely are looking to push their presence and ways of archiving and involvement of others outside the news organization...
Now when does a newspaper chain/big company start buying in to a blogging company next!!!!

Now when does a newspaper chain/big company start buying in to a blogging company next!!!!

Free fact checkers!

Aussie, I was wondering the same thing and then I started thinking about it.... even though the New York Times is on the record saying that they are not, About.com is in a sense, one of the orignal blogging networks (along with the community sites like Geocities, Tripod and TheGlobe.com). Think about it - they are a decentralized group of people who are generating content across very niche topics. I understand that there are some differences between what About.com Guides do and the blogosphere as we have come to know it, but there are very interesting similarities too.

Overall with this deal, the Times obviously gains loads of content (and a diversification to the way it's generated), lots of immediate PPC revenue and perhaps most applicable for this discussion board, expertise in the area of search engine optimization.

They have had issues ranking well organically (see this article from Wired, last summer: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64110,00.html) because of the dynamic nature of their site - both in terms of the news always changing and because their business model calls for stories older than one week to get put in a database that requires payment for access.

We'll see if the more static, content-rich About.com can help them thrive in this area.

I agree with the observation regarding About et al and blogs... before the method was brought center stage... these types were the blogs... the groups... Yahoo and others have moved to the blogs in many cases.

As this medium grows we will have very niched news... and finally perhaps people will become very aware of the fact that news is impacted by the perspective of the eyes looking at it.

Now when does a newspaper chain/big company start buying in to a blogging company next!!!!
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