About.com

Seven hundred human guides, four owners, one quiet rebrand

Replaced
19902026

About.com began in 1997 as The Mining Company, a network of hundreds of paid human "guides" each running a topic site. Renamed About.com in 1999, it passed through Primedia for $690 million, The New York Times for $410 million and IAC for around $300 million. In 2017 IAC split it into six vertical brands and retired the name.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 1997
  2. 21 April 1997 Launch
    The Mining Company launches

    Hundreds of paid human guides, each running one topic.

  3. 1999
  4. May 1999 Rebrand
    Renamed About.com

    A shorter name for the same idea.

  5. 2000
  6. October 2000 Acquisition
    Primedia pays $690 million

    Agreed at the peak of the dot-com market, closed after it burst.

  7. 2005
  8. 17 February 2005 Acquisition
    The New York Times pays $410 million

    About.com becomes the Times's digital profit engine.

  9. 2011
  10. February 2011 Decline
    Google's Panda update

    Sprawling general-purpose content sites lose their search traffic.

  11. 2012
  12. 26 August 2012 Acquisition
    Sold to IAC for about $300 million

    A quarter less than the Times paid seven years earlier.

  13. 2017
  14. 2 May 2017 Shutdown
    About.com becomes Dotdash

    The brand is retired; the content lives on across six vertical sites.

  15. 2025
  16. 12 August 2025 other
    The successor renames again

    Dotdash Meredith becomes People Inc.

The site through time

Browse about.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

1997 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 2017 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Scott Kurnit 1997–2001 Founded Launched The Mining Company, renamed it About.com in 1999
Primedia 2001–2005 Acquisition, $690M A $690 million stock deal agreed at the very top of the dot-com bubble
The New York Times Company 2005–2012 Acquisition, $410M The profitable digital arm of the Times for seven years
IAC 2012–2017 Acquisition, $300M Bought it for a quarter less than the Times paid, split it into Dotdash's vertical brands in 2017

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: IAC retired the About.com brand on 2 May 2017 and renamed the company Dotdash, having spent the previous year moving the content onto six new vertical sites such as Verywell and The Spruce. The About.com name, associated with two decades of everything-about-everything pages, was judged to be worth less than no name at all.

Our analysis: About.com was built for a web where one trusted generalist site could answer anything, and it died of that width. Google's quality updates punished sprawling general-purpose content, and advertisers paid more for focused audiences. The company concluded that the brand itself was the liability, kept the articles, and shed the name. Commercially, the successor worked.

History [edit]

Humans, not algorithms

Scott Kurnit launched The Mining Company on 21 April 1997 with an idea that sat halfway between Yahoo\'s directory and blogging before blogging existed: recruit ordinary people as paid "guides", each responsible for one topic, each running what amounted to their own site under a shared roof. Hundreds of guides covered everything from home repair to French cooking, writing articles, curating links and answering readers.

The name changed to About.com in May 1999, and the model rode the boom. Primedia agreed to pay about $690 million in stock for it at the top of the dot-com market in October 2000, a deal that closed months before the crash made a mockery of the price. In February 2005 The New York Times Company bought it for $410 million, and for several years About.com was the profitable engine bolted to a newspaper company in decline, reaching tens of millions of readers a month.

What Google gave, Google took

About.com\'s traffic came overwhelmingly from search, and its sprawl, tens of thousands of pages of uneven quality across every topic imaginable, was exactly what Google\'s Panda updates began punishing in 2011. Traffic and revenue slid, and in August 2012 the Times sold the property to IAC for roughly $300 million, a quarter less than it had paid.

IAC\'s answer, under chief executive Neil Vogel, was to conclude that the content was fine and the brand was the problem. Nobody wanted health advice from a site that also reviewed lawnmowers. Through 2016 and 2017 the company moved the best of the library onto new focused sites: Verywell for health, The Balance for money, The Spruce for home, Lifewire for tech, TripSavvy for travel, ThoughtCo for education.

The name comes down

On 2 May 2017 the company announced that About.com itself was becoming Dotdash, named after the Morse code for the letter A. There was no shutdown day for readers to mourn; the articles had already moved. Dotdash later bought the magazine publisher Meredith in 2021, becoming Dotdash Meredith, and in 2025 renamed itself again to People Inc., after its biggest title. The everything-site of 1997 ended as a portfolio of specialist brands, which is roughly the story of the web in between.

The domain today

about.com redirects to the corporate site of People Inc. The guide-written topic pages live on, edited and re-homed, across the company\'s vertical sites.

Similar projects

Encarta The encyclopedia on a CD, killed by a website 1993–2009 goo.gl Google's link shortener, and the day old links died 2009–2025 Google Hangouts One messenger to rule them all, briefly 2013–2022 HP TouchPad Killed 49 days after launch 2011–2011 Justin.tv One man's life stream that became Twitch 2007–2014 MobileMe The Apple service Steve Jobs apologised for 2008–2012

Sources [edit]

  1. IAC is buying About.com from NYT for $300M TechCrunch 26 August 2012 [archived]
  2. About.com is shutting down its iconic website The Verge 26 April 2017 [archived]
  3. Dotdash Meredith rebrands as People Inc. Adweek 12 August 2025 [archived]

Last verified: 14 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).