About.com is a network of sites on about 540 topics that relies on paid human "Guides" to cover a specific topic by providing relevant content and building an online community related to their topic. The topic sites, which are divided into channels, cover subjects from home repair to pediatrics. Much of the information is original content written by the Guides, and can take the form of articles, online courses, interactive quizzes, and so forth.
About.com used The Human Internet as an advertising tagline to promote itself as an alternative to machine-based search portals.
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Contents
- 1 Content
- 2 History
- 3 External links
- 4 References
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Content
The topic-sites consist of mostly original content, with selected links to external content deemed to have good quality by the Guides. There are also detailed articles or commentaries written by the Guides. Some sites have dictionaries, how-to lessons, and free ECourses. For example, the sites on major European languages have comprehensive lessons illustrated by audio files recorded by the Guides themselves.
Each topic-site has at least one forum, provided at the Advanced level (with HTML capability and uploading), for registered users. Site visitors may subscribe to free email newsletters for each site. Some Guides participate daily at the forum, and some offer a chat room.
In 2006, the diseases and condtions sites in the About.com health channel, as well as some other About.com health sites became HONCode accredited (Health On the Net Foundation).
History
About.com was originally founded as The Mining Company. The site was launched on April 21st, 1997 by Scott Kurnit, owner of General Internet, and a group of other entrepreneurs in New York City. The original goal was to maintain 1,800 topic areas, but after five years of operation, this number was eventually reduced to 700. The original business plan offered expert guides a minimum rate of $250 a month or one-third of the advertising revenue generated within their topic area. The Mining Company also employed around 50 full time staff for administration, advertising sales and the overall site design work.
The company changed its name to About, Inc. on May 17th 1999, and the web site address miningco.com, to About.com. The renaming was partly to broaden the appeal of the site and the instant brand equity during the Internet bubble of using a simple word followed by dot com as both site address and company name. The company was acquired by PRIMEDIA in 2000 in a deal that valued About at $690 million. In February 2005, The New York Times Company announced that it was buying About.com, a purchase that was completed in the first half of the year for $410 million in cash. Google along with Yahoo!, Ask.com, and AOL were reportedly among the other bidders.
It eliminated over 40% of its topic-sites in 2002. Most of the eliminated sites are not merged, and their contents are no longer accessible to the general public.
In 2002, 77 former and current About.com Guides filed a class-action suit in New York against PRIMEDIA. The complaint was that labor laws were violated and contracts breached. The case was still ongoing as of March 2006. [1]
External links
References
Categories: Educational websites | Companies established in 1997
