About.com

» see about.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

if you searched for almost anything how-to in english between 2000 and 2010, you ended up on an about.com page eventually. you probably did not notice. that was the whole pitch. about.com had a paid human "guide" for every topic on earth, several hundred of them, and that guide kept a sub-site running with articles about pottery or excel macros.

it started in april 1997 as scott kurnit's the mining company, then rebranded to about.com in 1999. the bubble loved it. primedia paid 690 million dollars for the company in 2000, days before the dot-com window slammed shut. five years later the new york times bought it from primedia for 410 million, and iac took it from the times in 2012 for 300 million. each owner wrote down the value, and each handover felt slightly more like a fire sale.

i used about.com indirectly. studying computer engineering in turkey in the mid-2000s with ttnet at home and english reference material everywhere, you'd google a windows registry tweak or a c question at three in the morning, and the first or second result was always an about.com page. the byline always belonged to some american who had been the about.com guide to whatever for eight years. i never noticed it as a brand. it was just where answers came from.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was ~

the model was 1990s genius and 2010s liability at once. instead of an editorial newsroom, about.com paid contractors per topic, gave them subdomains, and let them publish. by mid-2000s there were over 700 guides covering every conceivable niche. the result was an enormous, lukewarm, search-optimized layer over the english-language web.

it was the version of wikipedia that came before wikipedia, except instead of volunteers it was contracted experts, and instead of neutrality it had personality plus ads.

~ what really happened ~

two things killed it. wikipedia absorbed the free reference layer, and google's february 2011 panda algorithm was effectively a content-farm hunt. about.com's whole structure looked like a content farm to panda even when individual guides were genuinely good. traffic kept climbing for a couple more years on sheer scale, but the per-page authority bled out. iac spent the 2010s slicing the property into vertical brands like verywell for health and the spruce for home, and on may 2 2017 the about.com brand was officially retired. the parent company became dotdash.

~ the long tail ~

those vertical brands still pull traffic in 2026 under a new parent name (people inc., as of 2025), but if you tell anyone under thirty that there used to be a single domain that was the about of everything, they think you're describing wikipedia. the byline-with-a-face guide concept also vanished. the rest of the web went anonymous SEO content, then unsigned AI content. the human-named expert in the corner of every topic was a shape we did not keep.

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