Completing the dismantling of Tom Rogers' vision of Primedia as a broad-market Internet player, Primedia plans to sell About.com. About.com is primarily a consumer-oriented network of sites led by “experts” in fields such as automotive, food & drink, home & garden, teens, and travel. Because of the broad and general topic coverage and consumer audience, About.com never developed into the Internet channel for Primedia's enthusiast magazines or its B2B properties, so severing About.com from Primedia will be mostly bloodless.
Among the bidders, Google, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, and AOL would be natural fits as buyers, as all are hungry for more ad inventory - Web pages on which to sell contextual ads. The New York Times appears to be a longshot, so if it turns out to be the winner, this will signal a new or broader strategy - one much closer to that of the popular New England site Boston.com (which it owns and is related to the Boston Globe), than to NYTimes.com.
Side Thought: Ask Jeeves’ bid has to be seen in the context of its acquisition earlier this week of the popular Web-based RSS newsreader Bloglines. With a couple of swift moves, Jeeves could find itself with a stable of proprietary blogs with original content, AND one of the most popular proprietary platforms for viewing blogs with RSS, AND a search engine that can beef up the Bloglines blog search capability. The Bloglines acquisition has kicked the Ask Jeeves brand up a notch, not the other way around – a measure of the current sexiness of blogs.
