• by Jim Meskauskas , February 10, 2005

Remember the Mining Company? Their logo was a little pick-axe, and their value proposition was that, unlike the cold automatons of Yahoo! or Alta Vista, Mining Company had human beings looking at and vetting sites on the Web for inclusion in search results.

Among these human beings were "guides," each of them considered specialists in a given field germane to a particular content category. They would manage, and in some cases even create, content relative to that given category. So, if the content area was cancer, let's say, perhaps an oncologist - or maybe a cancer survivor - would provide some editorial and serve as overseer to the sites listed as relevant to a search.

A few years later, office voicemail recorded mysterious and disembodied voices saying "Hello, is anybody out there?" and non-descript cardboard boxes arrived with a black T-shirt that had white letters spelling out the same statement across the front and back.

The Mining Company had become About.com.

Within a year, Primedia, long a force in magazine publishing, producing a wide array of specialty publications like Shutterbug and Guns and Ammo, bought the portal for nearly $700 million. Dreams of avarice to be found with Internet presences were still rampant then, even as portends of doom abounded, epitomized six months earlier with the NASDAQ crash in March of 2000.

This week I read in The New York Times that Primedia has put the portal up for sale for $350 million to $500 million. Rumors already being pressed through the mill have Google, Yahoo!, AOL, and even The New York Times itself all in the running with bids on the property.

It's no wonder Primedia is getting rid of About.com. Though About.com is a strong property by itself, so long as it lived under Primedia's antediluvian umbrage, About.com was going to continue to whither but never quite die, like that one branch of leaves of the spider-plant on your desk that just never quite survived the drought it suffered, with no one to water it while you were away in St. Croix for 10 days.

Primedia has always treated About.com like the houseplant of a well meaning, but easily distracted apartment dweller that lives alone. Sporadic enthusiasm for the property was shown from time to time when the sun would warm the windowsill and remind one that the world can be a positive and soothing place, inspiring bonhomie and leading to the occasional redesign or an improvement in management.

Continued strategic neglect, however, left About.com with brittle roots in the new pot into which it was transplanted. The announcement late 2004 that all health content on About.com - health content quite possibly among the most sought after inventory on the Web -- was being handed over to the rep firm, Choice Media, well, it was clear what was going on.

No living thing lives and thrives with part-time love. Primedia never really had the kind of commitment to About.com that it should for something precious enough to have paid $690 million. After years of sporadic watering and very occasionally playing it an abridged version of "Cosi fan tutti," the thing is little more than a thin leaf.

This is not to say the business of About.com is wasted, however. About.com is a great property with a lot to offer a person searching for discrete information - say, uterine fibroid embolization, or stops along the Camino de Santiago pilgrim's path. Primedia was simply never willing to make it part of a larger corporate strategy, deciding instead to renew its focus on print.

What Primedia never seemed to realize is that About.com could have served as the perfect proscenium for digital versions of Primedia's content. About.com already is a great way to find summarized niche content and then be led on one's way to greater depth and detail.

Primedia's existing body of content could have been that depth and detail, giving people more reasons to spend time with their media. Last week I wrote that time is going to become the currency of brand and media engagement (and I pointed out that in some ways it already is). Primedia had everything to gain by making About.com the means by which people are introduced to and then have a relationship with, their content.

Alas, a need for capitol and what would seem like an uncertain vision has led instead to a fire sale. About.com could have been Primedia's way of competing with AOL, another Internet company acquired by a traditional media company that has also had doubts about what "hath been wrought." The difference is that it would appear AOL is turning the soil for a planting, on the verge of realizing the promise of having access to so much content, while Primedia is trying to dump the land.