WP: It's a Web Buying Spree for Big Media

[DeepModem Mom]

It's a Web Buying Spree for Big Media
By Leslie Walker
Thursday, September 8, 2005; Page D05


Sharon Keating, a lawyer in New Orleans, grabbed her laptop as she fled Hurricane Katrina with her family in a three-car caravan. For the past 11 days, Keating has been blogging about her evacuation on the home page of About.com, a Web site owned by the New York Times Co.

Tiny details brought her account to life, such as her husband waking in a hotel and saying, "I don't own a pair of socks," and her own feelings of guilt that she couldn't stop thinking about things she left behind, including the afghan her grandmother made for her fifth birthday.

Keating is one of 500 "guides" paid to write on special-interest topics for About.com, one of the Internet's most heavily trafficked sites even though it is not well known. She usually writes a tourist guide to New Orleans, but her part-time hobby suddenly became newsy, emotional and much more widely read after Katrina devastated the city where she was born and raised.

About.com is among the many Web properties that traditional media companies have snapped up this year as they scramble to cash in on the second big Internet advertising boom. While Internet ads claim a small slice of the overall ad pie -- generating not quite $10 billion in the United States last year, less than 5 percent of all ad revenue -- the online dollars grew more than 30 percent, much faster than off-line. In response, traditional media companies have been making some startling moves.

The New York Times Co. in March paid $410 million for About.com, a seemingly disjointed collection of articles covering thousands of topics. Perhaps more surprising was the $580 million cash purchase that News Corp. announced in July of MySpace.com, another hodgepodge with more traffic than name recognition....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/07/AR2005090702178.html