Ask.com buys About.com for $300M | Hacker News Reader

Ask.com buys About.com for $300M

zdnet.com

81 pointsboopsie40 comments

All 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.

>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/eli...

I didn't mean to imply any hate towards reddit in my original post. While the quality of some parts is questionable, reddit is undoubtedly a hub filled with great content and knowledgeable people. Amazingly interesting and insightful posts await those who are willing to dig for it. My reddit addition is just as strong as anyone's.

r/askscience is one of the best moderated forums on the web when it comes to keeping things on topic -- I have asked several questions there that have received brilliantly scientific explanations by experts in their respective fields

I'd agree with this -- if I do a google search for something pretty general and get the typical array of search results, I'll always check out about.com result before any similar site.

Because they actually do their job and provide good answers a decent percentage of the time; and generally feel less spammy/scammy than most sites.

I agree. About.com has a lot of decent "here's the basics" and "how-to" type articles. I don't even understand why it's seen as a content farm, since their contributors are of better quality than say those who write articles on AOL.

About.com was nuked out of google serps, because it has terrible usability statistics:

  - high bounce rate
  - 90%+ search engine traffic vs direct visits 
  (even though they buy traffic from other (cheap) sources)
  - very low time spent on site
  - very low returning visitors ratio

Their website design is quite pretty, yet the awful usability stats.

Website called as "content farm" and poor usability stats, coincidence or..?

Web analyst here. Those stats make About sound fantastic, as a matter of fact. There is no such thing as a universal "usability" metric, and everything is relative to the site and its goals and use cases. For About, those statistics are exactly what you would expect if the site is doing its job well.

The use case for About is you have a specific question, and you find a page that answers it. If the page actually answers your question (i.e., the site is doing its job), then you will have no need to view other pages, so your bounce rate will look high. If it answers the question succinctly and efficiently, your time spend on that page will be low. And if your problem is actually solved, you won't have to come back. And lo, that is actually what we see.

If About isn't doing its job, then there are two common "failure" scenarios. The first is they spend a bunch of time on the site, trying to find the info they're looking for. The second is that they exit the site and go back to Google. The first failure scenario has a higher "usability" score that the success scenario; the second failure scenario actually looks pretty much identical to the success scenario. Google could distinguish between the two by seeing whether users come back or not; you didn't provide that data, so I can't tell.

About.com is not a content site the same way as a news site or a blog. If you judge it by metrics suited for such a site, it will appear lacking. If you judge it by its own goal, it might actually be succeeding (but you need more data to tell for sure).

Agreed. It's pretty much my go to web resource for entertaining. A fairly good curated selection of recipes, good explanations of flavor combinations, good crafts, theme ideas, and everything else. Lots of the sites with reader contribution end up being pretty awful.

I agree. For example, atheism.about.com is a very well-curated section, run by an experienced and knowledgeable guide. It deserves more attention than it gets.

Nice try, Ask.com employee.

What makes you think that he is an Ask.com employee?

Ironically, "Nice try, x" is a Reddit meme itself.

Yep. I was joking.

Business 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.

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

I'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

So... 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?

About.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.

Your standards differ from mine then.

IAC is already the Viacom of the internet

I 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.

One 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)

machine generated "content" must be profitable, no suprise here

Its 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.

Some 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=...

[2] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/08/21/us-nyt-about-sale-...

This is the first time I'm wishing for an acquisition to shut a product down.

I am amazed Ask.Com is making enough money to fund a 300M purchase... who uses Ask.Com????

Oh just saw the other comments about the parent and its other subsidiaries.

Who 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.

According 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...

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.

Right? 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

Me too. I haven't heard about anything about Ask.com recently.

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