NY Times Dumps About.com

The New York Times is selling off About.com, one of the first significant online content farmers, to Barry Diller's IAC for a reported $300 million in much-needed cash.  The deal was described by analysts as part of the NYT strategy to sell off "non-core" assets and refocus on its major newspapers and digital publishing extensions.  The Times originally acquired About.com in 2005 for $410 million, and NYT reported that digital revenues for About.com fell 25% in 2011, while profits declined 67%.

  Analysts seem to think that divesting itself of this particular profit center was a good move by the Times company - improvements in search engines and a glut of content and portals are making About.com-type content farms less and less valuable.  The original goal of About.com was to

cull the most meaningful content from expert editors and writers on the most important subject matter, quite frequently how-to tips and general reference information.

By refocusing on the core news product, the New York Times company is following

a vision that context, not content may actually be king in a digital publishing environment where content has become ubiquitous and seemingly undifferentiated, especially as the lines between professional journalism, user- and brand-generated content seem to be tipping the scales,

One aspect of this is the idea that the value of fairly generic content is likely to fall in a "marketplace of information glut," while information that adds value (through style, context, or form) can differentiate itself and become "premium" content and more highly valued. 
  And the information glut is coming - research released by Facebook found that a decade ago, the Internet was generating and hosting one petabyte of new content annually.  By the end of this year, the report suggests the Internet will generate one petabyte of new information and content every two to three days.

Source  -  About Time: Times Sells It To IAC For $300 Million,  Online Media Daily