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Ask.com buys About.com for $300M
- sabat 14y agoWho realized that Ask.com was successful enough to buy someone else for $300M? Wow.
- tg3 14y agoAccording to their most recent 10Q [1], IAC's "Search and Applications" segment (which I'm guessing is mostly Ask.com) had $74M in Operating Income on $350M in Revenue for April - June, 2012. [1] http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=891103&accession_number=0001047469-12-007663&xbrl_type=v# http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=891103...
- freehunter 14y agoI actually thought the other way around, I figured About.com was worth more than 1/3 of an Instagram.
- Achshar 14y agoInstagram 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.
- sp332 14y agoAt 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.
- arunoda 14y agoMe too. I haven't heard about anything about Ask.com recently.
- temuze 14y agoRight? These are the same guys who had an XSS vulnerability in their freaking search bar a year ago! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2930363 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2930363
- maayank 14y agoIt's IAC, owners of ask.com, match.com, okcupid.com, Vimeo. Who knows how they structured this deal.
- mikemarotti 14y agoOne change to the Google SERP ranking algorithm is going to ruin their day.
- syassami 14y agothis is exactly my thoughts. I feel like they haven't been as prevalent as they were in results a while ago when searching.
- jaredmck 14y agoAbout.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)
- illuminate 14y ago"About.com got hit pretty hard by the Panda algorithm change" Oh good, while still one of the better ones, their content was often still somewhat sprawly and unhelpful. They still focused too much on having breadth of content without having enough quality content. The best of the content farms is still a content farm in the end.
- dotborg 14y agomachine generated "content" must be profitable, no suprise here
- maayank 14y agoSome background: there was a month-long bidding war between answers.com and IAC (ask.com) for about.com[1]. I wonder how things went since IAC's offer[2]. Did Answers upped their offer? Did it went personal and they left the table? One can wonder. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/27/technology/times-about/?hpt=hp_t3 http://money.cnn.com/2012/08/27/technology/times-about/?hpt=... [2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/21/us-nyt-about-sale-idUSBRE87K10Y20120821 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/21/us-nyt-about-sale-...
- fredsanford 14y agoSo... A search engine with obnoxious and intrusive ads is going to buy a mostly mediocre content site with obnoxious and intrusive ads and we're supposed to be happy and use this stuff? This will become the Viacom of the internet... Content without content?
- rwhitman 14y agoIAC is already the Viacom of the internet
- neurotech1 14y agoAbout.com is quite good for content IMO. The ads are kind of annoying though. I don't think they are $300m good, and they have lost a lot of value due to open content like Wikipedia.
- fredsanford 14y agoYour standards differ from mine then.
- nhebb 14y agoBusiness Insider has more details here: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-money-the-new-york-times-was-losing-on-aboutcom-2012-8 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.
- AznHisoka 14y agoA content farm covering a story about a content farm buying a content farm.
- menacingly 14y agoThese 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
- danso 14y agoI'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/ 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
- scottilee 14y agoThis is the first time I'm wishing for an acquisition to shut a product down.
- dberg 14y agoI 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.
- hackinthebochs 14y agoAll this hate for about.com just goes to show how much of a bubble some of you guys' internet activity exists in. As far as "content farms" go, they are very good at what they do. The quality of their articles have always been very well done (for the information I was looking for). I never got the feeling of landing on an SEO spammer site when I landed about.com. Actually, I used to spend quite a lot of time on about.com many years ago. Their sections are more than just content farm pages, they're also communities centered around specific topics. Think reddit without the childish memes and BS. The quality of discussions there were always much higher than you'd find on most popular places on the web today. Much value exists on the internet outside of the techcrunch echo chamber. Dismiss it at your own peril.
- antidaily 14y agoNice try, Ask.com employee.
- tmh88j 14y ago>Think reddit without the childish memes and BS. I agree, however, for simple answers I've had some very good luck on r/explainlikeimfive. If anyone here hasn't seen that subreddit I suggest taking a look at it. There are plenty of things that I had no idea about and someone can explain it very simply in a very short paragraph, compared to a wall of text that other places might provide (assuming I just want a simple answer). Take this for example. http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ywh1y/eli5_the_spanish_inquisition/ http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ywh1y/eli...
- cstrat 14y agoI am amazed Ask.Com is making enough money to fund a 300M purchase... who uses Ask.Com????
- cstrat 14y agoOh just saw the other comments about the parent and its other subsidiaries.
- BlackNapoleon 14y agoIts funny when you think about it because you never realize how important that site is for many people who aren't as savvy as the rest of you all. Gotta remember that for every person who uses the web, there is someone who knows even less about it. There is a niche for everyone. Literally.