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About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#11

Post by kareemm »

jbail wrote: post #3

It was curious when AOL bought About.me four days after About.me launched. 4 days. That's insanely fast. Tony Conrad must have friends at AOL. What's curious is buying the company back. Maybe Conrad is returning a favor? In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring. You want a personal site? There are 10,000 ways to do that. I don't see the value in it personally...and maybe AOL doesn't either, but…

Conrad's company previous to About.me, Sphere, was purchased by AOL in 2008:

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/14/aol-buys-sphere-content-eng...

Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#12

Post by eksith »

jbail wrote: post #3

It was curious when AOL bought About.me four days after About.me launched. 4 days. That's insanely fast. Tony Conrad must have friends at AOL. What's curious is buying the company back. Maybe Conrad is returning a favor? In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring. You want a personal site? There are 10,000 ways to do that. I don't see the value in it personally...and maybe AOL doesn't either, but…

In terms of just a personal page, you're right there many alternatives, but About.me brings its domain to the table. That's really the entire value of the company if you think about it. It's just the domain + mini-CMS for quick personal pages.

Plus, I imagine, it couldn't hurt to have a simple profile page linked somewhere.

Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#13

Post by adventured »

I think About.me should go after the work networking space in some manner that gets them out of the 'personal page' business. It's a huge space that LinkedIn isn't going to own all of. Just like there's room for Pinterest and Twitter (among others) along with Facebook, there's room for other large LinkedIn variations.

Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#14

Post by adventured »

mattmanser wrote: post #4

Anyone interested what we had to say when it was purchased in the first place: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2025764 Still, bubble's been going a while now hasn't it! I think this was when a lot of people here started saying 'bubble!'. Me included. If it's a bubble, it's becoming a big old one.

A bubble can brew and stew for years, the original dotcom bubble did for example. No two bubbles ever act the same either of course. This one might rumble longer but be more shallow, and it might constantly shift focus as all the cheap money hops from hype to hype (until the cheap money goes away that is).

Not to mention I think it's necessary to account for people jumping the gun early due to a reflex from fallout of the last bubble.

Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#16

Post by itsprofitbaron »

hkmurakami wrote: post #9

I still respect Conrad for making the initial sale (supposedly) for the benefit of his team, who, unlike Conrad himself, hadn't experienced a startup exit yet.

Before founding About.me he was a Co-Founder and CEO of Sphere, when it sold to Aol in 2008 for $25M[1]

He's also a founding member and partner at True Ventures which he has seen exits such as: Oddpost (acquired by Yahoo!), Iconoculture (acquired by Corporate Executive Board), MusicNow (acquired by Circuit City), and Centive (acquired by Xactly)[2]

[1] http://gigaom.com/2008/04/14/aol-buys-sphere/

[2] http://www.trueventures.com/member/tony-conrad/

Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#17

Post by tokenadult »

From the co-founder quotation in the article: "There’s no obvious leverage in being part of the AOL media network, and there’s no synergy and integration." That's the rub. AOL used to have more "network effects" than everyone else in the online business, and that didn't help them figure out how to provide value for their business partners. My prediction for Facebook corresponds to this: "Facebook will go the way of AOL, still being a factor in the industry years from now, but also serving as an example of a company that could never monetize up to the level of the hype surrounding it." Gathering millions of pairs of eyeballs is a wonderful achievement, but helping business partners for your network find value by how they are able to reach users through your network is even more wonderful.

AFTER EDIT: The submission of the story here did more to prompt me to interact with About.me than anything I've done on an AOL property in the last two years, so I guess it is a good move for About.me to go independent again.

Re: About.me Buys Itself Back from AOL

#18

Post by eoghan »

jbail wrote: post #3

It was curious when AOL bought About.me four days after About.me launched. 4 days. That's insanely fast. Tony Conrad must have friends at AOL. What's curious is buying the company back. Maybe Conrad is returning a favor? In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring. You want a personal site? There are 10,000 ways to do that. I don't see the value in it personally...and maybe AOL doesn't either, but…

> In the end, what About.me brings to the table is pretty boring.

I don't agree. If you start to think about what could disrupt LinkedIn, you realize that there's a good chance it could look like About.me. I bet in 12 months, About.me will find some direct competitors. This is a big opportunity IMO.

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