IAC has launched its first vertical, Verywell, a site that repackages existing health content on About.com to make it easier to read and navigate. About.com hopes to introduce more brands and designs that will resonate with younger web and social media users, as well as advertisers.

Publishers Daily spoke to About.com CEO Neil Vogel about future plans for more verticals.

Publishers Daily: Why did About.com decide to split up its content on different sites?

We just needed a model for the future. About.com was conceived as a large, high quality, general interest site. The Internet changed, and while the quality of our content changed, our model didn’t change.

Our biggest most important vertical of content is our health content. We thought that was a great candidate to be the first vertical. It’s very rare that you can attack a market as a new competitor and do it as the third- or fourth-biggest guy in the space.

That’s what we can do with health and a couple other verticals. It’s a transitional time for us. It doesn't come without risk and challenges but we like our chances.

If you’re interested in cooking dinner for somebody, you’re going to be interested in getting that recipe from a site that’s known for food and recipe videos, not next to content about how to paint your child’s room or diagnose why you have a stomachache.

People want to trust information. We found out that we need to put it in a visual way. There’s no place on the Internet to do mediocre things because there’s always someone doing it really well.

Publishers Daily: Can you expand on About.com’s plans to create separate sites for home, travel, tech and personal finance content? Why these verticals?

We are trying to find places where we are the top sites in that space and go from there. We are trying to find editorial niches in our verticals where we can really be effective.

About is looking at interesting personal finance content that skews toward millennials and women. Our travel content is all professionally written, which is different from the space. We have tech content that will help fix things when they’re not working right.

Publishers Daily: How does splitting up into different verticals affect advertising for About.com?

The reason why we’re doing this is for consumers. Product wins no matter how many advertisers you have. Health advertisers want to be in a targeted health and wellness environment, they don’t want to be in an environment from a general-interest site.

If you’re targeting diabetes content, you want a place where there is safe and trusted content for that. We have seen a material uptick in our pipeline for health advertising. People are actually calling us. It’s proof of concept.