Ask.com buys About.com for $300M (zdnet.com) |
Ask.com buys About.com for $300M (zdnet.com) |
Much value exists on the internet outside of the techcrunch echo chamber. Dismiss it at your own peril.
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...
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.
- 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
Website called as "content farm" and poor usability stats, coincidence or..?
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.
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
This will become the Viacom of the internet... Content without content?
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.
[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-...
[1] http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/viewer?action=view&cik=891103...
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).