These organizations are both so far removed from my life that you could have switched their names in the title and it would have had the same impact
Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
I actually thought the other way around, I figured About.com was worth more than 1/3 of an Instagram.
Instagram was paid in cash and stock whose value is now lower that what it was at the time of sale. This deal however is cash. So the comparison is not very simple.
At the time it was worth $1B total, regardless of how it has depreciated since. Anyway it's still more than 2x what About.com went for.
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#13I'm constantly amazed at how often I stumble upon About.com's material, even for topics well covered by more reputable sites. When I think of About.com, I think of junk content just barely better than Yahoo Answers...but some sections do have a wide breadth of content that you'd think would be too technical of minutiae for About.com
Here's their Ruby site: http://ruby.about.com/
Note: I can't say the quality of the technical writing is good. I'm just surprised they try to do so much at all, given the number of great technical blogs and free references out there (nevermind, ahem, Stack Overflow). It just goes to show that About.com's content strategy seems to be very lackadaisical
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#14Business Insider has more details here: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-money-the-new-... Revenues for About.com have been steadily declining. It's not surprising that the NYT dumped it. I'm just surprised that there was a bidding war over it.
A content farm covering a story about a content farm buying a content farm.
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#15One change to the Google SERP ranking algorithm is going to ruin their day.
this is exactly my thoughts. I feel like they haven't been as prevalent as they were in results a while ago when searching.
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#16Who realized that Ask.com was successful enough to buy someone else for $300M? Wow.
Right? These are the same guys who had an XSS vulnerability in their freaking search bar a year ago!
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#17This is the first time I'm wishing for an acquisition to shut a product down.
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#18Who realized that Ask.com was successful enough to buy someone else for $300M? Wow.
It's IAC, owners of ask.com, match.com, okcupid.com, Vimeo. Who knows how they structured this deal.
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#19One change to the Google SERP ranking algorithm is going to ruin their day.
this is exactly my thoughts. I feel like they haven't been as prevalent as they were in results a while ago when searching.
About.com got hit pretty hard by the Panda algorithm change - they have definitely been less prevalent in search recently, although they still appear to be reasonably profitable.
As far as content farms go, they're one of the better ones? (since they basically invented the space, and demand etc. took it to new depths of pathetic content)
Re: Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
#20I worked there and lived through the Primedia and NYT acquisition. The fact that they have sold this company this many times is amazing. The major equity holders probably cant believe their own luck.