April 27, 2004

Media company Primedia Inc. on Tuesday plans to unveil an overhaul of its About.com Internet portal, a revamp that follows the appointment of a new chief executive of the unit late last year.

Primedia is giving About.com, a provider of consumer-focused information on topics such as travel, food and health, a make-over in an effort to draw in more readers and build brand identity, the company said.

The relaunch is part of a series of changes at Primedia, which hired new Chief Executive Kelly Conlin last October and has sold high-profile magazines such as New York in an effort to focus more on special interest and business-to-business publications. Primedia earlier this year reorganized into four new business units to try to bolster performance.

"Previously, the About branding wasn't as strong as it should be ... " Peter Horan, About.com's CEO, said in an interview. "We want folks to view more pages on the site, and spend more time every time they visit us."

About.com ranked as the 14th most visited brand online in March with 21.4 million unique visitors, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. But many people discover its pages through Internet searches and do not know what Web site they are looking at, said David Card, an Internet analyst at Jupiter Research.

"One of the things they are trying to do is make it like a network so that they would have kind of a hub site where you would start off .. and then you might dive deep into the different categories," he said.

As part of the overhaul, the new site will offer more targeted advertising based on a user's profile, so that advertisers can in effect follow a user with specific ads wherever that person clicks on the site.

The stepped-up advertising comes after Primedia sold its online ad service Sprinks to search engine Google, the No. 1 Web search company in the United States. The October deal called for Google to become the exclusive provider of targeted and search advertising across About.com.

Primedia bought About.com for about $690 million, a much-hyped deal in late 2000 billed as a marriage of traditional publishing and new media. However, the company's Internet expansion came just as the Web and advertising markets suffered a steep downturn.

Source: Yahoo News

        

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