SES Chicago - December 7-11, 2009

December 6, 2005

About.com Ready to Relaunch

DMNews reports that about nine months after the NY Times purchased About.com, the site/service is about to relaunch. The news was made at SES yesterday by Scott B. Meyer, president/CEO of New York-based About.com. According to the article, the About.com database is home to about 57,000 topics and 1.2 million pieces of content.

Major advertisers have more than nodding familiarity with About.com, however. In their ranks are the U.S. Army, State Farm, General Mills, Sara Lee and SBC, which becomes at&t later this month. Then there's Walmart.com, the No. 1 advertiser on About.com.

"Wal-Mart is trying to be trend-forwarding, and online is where they're beginning," said Mark W. Westlake, senior vice president of sales and marketing at About.com.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:55 PM | Permalink

March 9, 2005

SEO Big For About.com

What's the value of organic search engine optimization? It apparently contributed quite a bit to the $410 million that the New York Times paid for About.com. Note the heavy discussion of how SEO has helped About in driving traffic in this Online Journalism Review article, About.com CEO explains why NYT spent $410 million to buy site.

Quoted about About's SEO efforts is CEO Peter Horan. Behind the scenes, it's SEO veteran Marshall Simmonds, one of our regular SES speakers, who orchestrates the optimization and in-house training of all those guides to help their content naturally do better.

Want some tips on what he does for the big site of About.com? See these past SearchDay articles and SES forum coverage: Big Sites + Big Brands = Big Search Engine Marketing Challenges, Home-Grown Search Engine Optimization, Big Sites / Big Brands

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 11:50 AM | Permalink

February 8, 2005

Yahoo!, Google, and AOL Place Bids To Purchase About.com

The New York Times article: About.com, Primedia's Web Venture, Is for Sale, alerts us to the fact that the About.com property is for sale but also that both Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and The New York Times are bidding to purchase the site.

Final bids must be received by today. According to The Times, the asking price is $350 million to $500 million.

About.com, bought by Primedia in October 2000 for $690 million in stock, was envisioned as a primary link among the company's many print publications, Web sites, newsletters and video programs. It offers a network of about 475 Web sites on a range of topics.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:56 AM | Permalink

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