Slashdot Mirror
New York Times Buys About.com for $410 Million
IAmTheDave writes "Reuters has the story that the New York Times Co. is set to purchase About.com for $410M from Primedia, Inc. The high purchase price is due to increased ad revenue, up 30% from last year." From the article: "Phillips pointed out that Internet companies have started trading again at significantly higher multiples, and said The Times Co. would be able to use ad revenue from About.com to make up for the flagging classified ad sales that have plagued the industry." Commentary also available at The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and CNN Money.
Really, I would prefer to keep all of these things seperate, but it can be useful and there's certainly some appeal for the publisher to gain new audiences.
How much you think they can get for slashdot? $400 million? Or is a quarter, used movie stub, and some pocket lint closer to the mark?
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
As long as it doesn't require free registration this could be good. About.com has alot of great content, on topics like cooking, pets, and cities (but not cooking pets in the city). But alot of it is outdated and flooded by popup ads. If NYT can improve the content then I say this is good news.
that i have used About.com more in the last year than all prior time added togehter. but then I realized that happens because about.com has increased the number of well placed google hits when I wanted to look up something. I think NYT better do their homework. I for one hate what an ad-fest about.com is and how random the value of their info is. Wikipedia, here I come. Were it not for their pushing themselves in my face via google, I would never have seen any of these ads that seem to have piqued NYT's interest.
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Competing with Wikipedia + the blogsphere, must the Grey Lady stoop to conquer? Or just find itself the first titanic newspaper to crash against a web iceberg?
--
make install -not war
Now, let me start with the disclaimer: there's nothing wrong with it. I'm a firm believer in good, old-fashioned capitalism and what any person or corporation wishes to risk his hard-earned capital on is entirely his decision. Al the best and I hope they make a bundle.
Having said that, is there still a line between news and marketing?
I remember, during the eighties, when a whole bunch of so-called "news magazine" programs, from Entertainment Tonight to First Edition and other similar shows came under fire because while pretending to be news programs, they were largely just marketing venues for the networks. However, the public adapted, and most people know how to distinguish between real news and slick-and-glossy "infotainment" (another word that came out of the eighties).
Nonetheless, going all the way back to Dateline NBC's exploding trucks (and I've spoken extensively to one of the producers about this issue, so let me also disclaim that no one who worked on that story still works for the show), I wonder if news and sales haven't become, well, the same process.
Sure, the bottom line is the bottom line. Newspapers exist to sell newspapers. That they report news is merely the product; the goal is to show a profit. If reporting news ceases to be a profitable product, newspapers will begin to... sell vacations on the Internet, perhaps?
My same favorite, Dateline NBC, ran a "two hour special" last year on Donald Trump. That special happened to coincide with his program The Apprentice. Were they reporting news, or hyping a television show? A producer told me, "Donald Trump is news. That he's affiliating himself with a television program is newsworthy. And interdepartamental hype is just part of the business."
So, what's the synergy? NYT runs a story on disaster recovery efforts in Asia. A sidebar on how some lovely small-town tourist attraction has already got back on its feet, and is open for visitors. Find out more at about.com, where several tourist agency links are ready to take your order. This, I suppose, is less tacky than the NYT simply running the agency ads alongside the article.
Where exactly is that line between news and marketing?
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
While some would say it has a left-wing bias too, I think the Washington Post provides much better coverage without the bias, and certainly without all the fake story scandals.
Old joke:
The people who run the world read The Wall Street Journal.
The people who think they run the world read The Washington Post.
The people who wish they ran the world read The New York Times.
(P.S. Both the Post and Journal have better reporting than the NYTimes now, which is sad. NY Times used to be the gold standard of journalism.)
In one instance, About.com allowed the complete piracy of a linux entertainment forum and claimed it as About.com intellectual property. I'm talking about Happypenguin.org. It was about a 8 moths ago (IIRC) when Happypenguin.org was set a host of a complete websuck by a About.com "editor"; duplicating the entire Happypenguin.org gamelist and comment forum into the Linux section on About.com. I think the "editor" caught is "Jurgen Haas" or some such. Hearing Bob Zambinski rant was worthy to mimic, under GPL of'course, to any similar situations. How would you like it if Slashdot initiated a webf^Hsuck on a great little website, kicking the bandwidth bill rigth in their face, and then claim all the "IP" as their own? That's what Jurgen Hass at About.com had done. And to this day, Slashdot has been doing the same and worse: Slashbombing little websites, unrepentantly! To quote the street-preacher in the crap movie JOHNY GNUMONIC, "Halt sinners!" (*SMACK*)
without prejudice
i saw this on the net a while ago and i dont remember if this was on slashdot...but its scary .. its happening!
http://www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html
Good Karma, Bad Karma, doesnt matter to me... I'm still going to say whats on my mind!