New York Times Set to Sell About.com for $270 Million to Answers.com | Hacker News Reader

New York Times Set to Sell About.com for $270 Million to Answers.com

allthingsd.com

19 pointsiProject13 comments

Unreal. How can such an awful website have $270 million on hand, and how can they be willing to spend it on another awful website?

They don't have $270 million on hand. They are looking for financing.

Whoops, my mistake - thanks for the correction.

Still baffled by how answers.com expects to get $270M of financing to buy about.com. To anyone who has ever clicked a link to either of those domains from a Google query, the headline must seem Onion-like.

My exact thoughts. There has been more than one occasion that I have found good resources on about.com. However, I don't think I can say the same for answers.com. Half the time I run across a page on it, there is no answer just the question. I got so tired of it I blocked it from all my Google search results. It's also filled with so many ads you can hardly find any information on it.

I hope these awful SEO-bait sites keep consolidating so they can eventually fade away into history. I've never gotten a useful answer from either site, just bombarded with ads and filler text. Quora and Wikipedia should be more than enough to fill that entire space (assuming Quora can keep up the quality as it gets more and more mainstream).

I know Yahoo Answers has a lot of spam but there's some gems in there that Quora doesn't have. Especially casual questions and questions related to sex.

This is a huge deal. Historically, about.com was an excellent reference, but with the advent of wikipedia and, in my opinion, the general decline in quality of about.com authorship, it was easy to ignore them.

Hopefully Answers.com can revitalize their unique editorial model, but I'm not really holding my breath.

It's not about Wikipedia. It's about the declining ROI on online publishing, and the effect of Google Panda on their bottom line. Historically, noone visited about.com for reference on a topic.. they just stumbled upon it when they saw it ranking #1 for a keyword.

About.com is the "for dummies" books of search results. Mediocre information on a wide vaiety of topics. It's kind of like a unisex salon in a one-horse town. You don't want to go, but it's there, so many do by default.

Quora, please, please send Answers / About to a spot in the late 90's graveyard next to Pets.com.

Anyone remembers the price About was sold several years back? I recall another private equity who bought it and then flipped it for bunch of profits.

It says in the article About was bought by the New York Times for $410 million in 2005.

hopefully getting rid of needless costs too. I don't know anyone who uses this

more ads than content. where is the value?

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