About.com, Mega Directory Sold to New York Times by Primedia
Aboout.com will become part of the NY Times. 410 million in cash and you too can have a major directory portal. So what can the NYT do with a major Internet portal that are Google, Yahoo, the AOL unit of Time Warner and AskJeeves, can’t do? There must be something, because $410 million is a steep price for a portal with the traffic levels that About.com has. A reporter at a major industry trade paper told me the multiple on revenues was significant (ten times) and the multiple on EBIDA was of course much higher (I think it was 30 times). In keeping with the web marketing theme, Primedia auctioned off the property, and the auction process took over a month and was being managed by Goldman Sachs.