Jason Calacanis starts an “Ask Jason” feature and I read with interest his first answer in the very offices of About.com:
1. Paul Short Asks: If you were to start a large content portal along the lines of About.com, what would you try to improve on or try to do better than them (or similar sites) in terms of a) organizing the content, b) initial promotion, and c) building in interactivity with your readers ,beyond comment features or newsletters.Paul: Trying to take on About.com would be like trying to take on a freight train with your mountain bike—it won’t be pretty. As Mark Cuban likes to say “if you want to run with the elephants you’re either quick or you’re dead.†So, given the fact that you’ll never beat About.com or Wikipedia.org at this point in the game, your best bet is to look at how far their content goes and at least triple the value they provide.
And he goes on to give good advice.
About.com is the most irrelevant and useless high equity valued media property on the net. Deconstruct their operating model and it’s not dissimilar to a network of blogs. What’s missing though is clever engaging discussion and utility in the form of high value link aggregation. We’re lucky Google has filtered them out of search results. About.com is only an operation a VC would love: it’s damn ugly for consumers.
Taking on a freight train with a mountain bike analogy you use is pure fiction. Don’t buy in or perpetuate this utter nonsense: there are virgins who might believe it. Jason’s motive in upping About.com is self interest in receiving his own high valuation and using About.com as a precedent. I’ll take $400M and start from scratch over the advertising revenue at About.com. I feel sorry for their sales reps. Jason, I commend your efforts of building a Blog Network but you are a long way from being worth over 15X Net Income. The same goes for About.com.
I’ll be hugely dissapointed if this comment is deleted.
Well, it’s not.
So where is the link to the rest of this interview?
To tell you the truth I had never heard of them>
link fixed. thanks.
I would have to agree with Marina: About.com is a large network with no presence. The content is just awful and the design is hideous. This will go down in NYT history as a business disastre on par with Time Warner’s AOL “merger.”