Who is about.com publisher

With the relaunch as Dotdash, the company is adding a fifth to the mix, ThoughtCo , which is focused on learning. A sixth property, the travel-focused TripSavvy, is scheduled to launch shortly. Founded in as The Mining Company, the original version of the portal went live in Then the company changed its name to About Inc. Well, it seems clear that if the company is to evolve beyond its roots, which are cemented in the early days of the web, it really has to shake off those legacy shackles.

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Which, again, you can make money doing that, you can harvest that for a long time. They thought they had something here. We can turn About. We were-. Still paying people to tell you how to fix your knee after you screw it up-.

Paying a lot of money, like more than anybody else on the internet to tell them how to fix their knee-. I dunno, well, depending on the vertical, anywhere from, like, a hundred to five hundred dollars an article that we then-. Oh, yeah. We went down to , pieces of content.

So that lined up with health, personal finance, tech, travel, and home and food. Three months to three year life. I mean, some stuff has What is the advantage of getting rid of content? You hurt your knee, you come in.

The average age of content on our health site is under a year, like you will not find something-. So you have three different constituencies, right? Because why would we when we can give it to The Verge? So Dell, or whomever knows that people are searching, looking for computer information-. Okay, so consumers have to trust it, brands have to trust it, and then algorithms have to trust it.

You present this to Barry Diller? There was a big article in like So, when we sold this story, the reaction everyone expected was like-. No, he was basically into We need to take back leverage. Take back leverage from who sends you traffic and how you get it, and take back leverage from how you make money. We are gonna focus exclusively on making the very, very best content. We are gonna make the fastest sites on the Internet.

And in every vertical we go in, we are going to have fewer ads than any of our competitors by a material, measurable amount. Do it. How quickly can you get these things launched? You replace it with Very Well. This article that I did pull up, was my words, not yours. Compared it to Mic. Facebook-oriented, highly valued web publisher circa , So, you do that with About. We launch Very Well and we do this thing, we make really great content, super fast site, fewer ads than everybody else, and all of a sudden of those constituencies, algorithms start to like us.

Like the thing you knew was coming, right? We launched five different brands. The lurch period was anywhere from like a week and a half to a couple of months. Couple of months. So, the darkest time, no. The darkest time was we were two months after the Very Well launch. We had some green shoots that it was gonna work. This was a non-reversible thing. And then over Labor Day weekend of , it just all started to click in and traffic started to go and traffic started to go.

And users liked that model, algorithms liked that model. And then what happened for advertisers is the most fascinating thing.

We knew that selling audiences we never thought was that interesting because you can get an audience anywhere and rates just get clobbered and crushed by everybody. So, the one thing that we knew and little bit, the one thing About always had is we have very intent driven traffic. You come because you want to learn or do something. Turns out that traffic is super clicky. When you take super clicky traffic-. I want to learn about plans, tell me more, tell me more, tell me more. So, what happened was our audience quality is extremely high.

Skews pretty young, really good. And we do no pre roll, no pop ups, no interstitials, none of that. But to back up a second, so when you switched from About.

On the back end, you can do some redirecting, right? Google is a faceless thing. I hope you guys like the new map. No, I wish you could. You got to give them the old map and the new map and the key to get from map to map. So, they figured it out, traffic went up. All of a sudden, we had some advertisers that still liked About. All of a sudden, our performance is off the charts. So, now the only way you can have leverage over advertisers today in is if your stuff works.

And the programmatic markets will tell you what works or not, empirically. That is not a core business one can be in.

Marginally, it can help you. So, our stuff started to really perform, so advertisers started to really like us. Advertisers really like us. I think Comscore, which we feel the same way that everyone else does, but we were like mids when we started this-. You know, we bumped around there. All in, across our five brands. So, About. No, zero bot traffic, zero roll up.

We roll up a very, very small health thing called Cleveland Clinic. No, no. So, I remember coming to the Internet and we spent a lot of time trying to make Yahoo happy, and then the next phase was trying to make Google happy.

Spent a lot of time optimizing for search and trying to figure it out, and a lot of articles about how unfair the Google search results were. Obviously went through the Facebook phase. Do you think that Google as a search engine, as a distributor of traffic, has changed in any significant way or is still kind of the same beast?

Anything any of these guys do is tricky. So, even while Google is keeping more people on site, providing more answers on site-. If you have diabetes and you need diabetes information, just because Google gives you some symptomatic answers on their page, you need real information about diabetes. So, what you empirically have to do is look at your content and look at everything else out on the Internet that covers the same thing, and is yours better?

I think so. Maybe some weird arbitrage with content marketing and Google Everything is designed to empower the content creators. This emphasis on quality editorial, Dotdash executives say, has powered the turnaround. The company will not disclose what it pays writers although it does not pay by the word as is traditional for publishing.

Most of its contributors are not journalists but rather professionals or subject matter experts moonlighting as content creators and promoting the work they do for Dotdash to burnish their reputations. The sites all share design, technology and sales resources. We are taking a Netflix approach to content creation. We are spending more money on service-based articles than any other media company.

Vogel has returned to his roots as a dealmaker and the media industry has plenty of distressed assets. Media companies beholden to Facebook and Google for distribution remain vulnerable because one algorithmic twitch can destroy your traffic. What if Google started showing large snippets of its content inside the search results and this triggered a decline in traffic?

Vogel hears this criticism multiple times a week, but he thinks digital executives should focus on good content and traffic will follow. The 20th-century magazine houses built iconic brands — Time, Vogue, Cosmopolitan — that monetized through their shaping of the cultural zeitgeist. But they know WebMD. For Vogel, this is the next frontier for growth. We have so much room to grow.

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