500 Weblogs

How much are 500 weblogs worth? $410 million! Or $820,000.00 per weblog! How do I know this? Because that's what the New York Times paid Prime Media (KKR) for About.com. You can't make this stuff up.

Here's some (mostly) positive comment, including the NYT press release. In fact, the deal is an embarrassment of overpayment and reveals a kind of strategic ennui. The "metro" strategy of marketing the newspaper has failed. The television strategy has failed. The great Internet opportunity of 2000-2001 has long since passed (the NYT company could have acquired Yahoo! for a relative song in 2001). Having failed to even comprehend the turbo-dynamics of Blogger, the NYT Company now throws $410 million at 500 weblogs.

It is a company adrift. At some point, institutional shareholders are going to start abandoning ship.