about.com
About.com was a major .com information website that answered everyday questions before its owner retired the brand and rebuilt its content into focused websites.
What was About.com?
About.com was built to help people learn something, solve a problem, or understand a topic without reading a long book.
The service behind the site began in 1997 as The Mining Company before the business adopted the About.com name in 1999.
Its simple idea was powerful because one website could cover health, money, travel, computers, education, food, hobbies, and many other subjects.
About.com used human writers called guides who focused on subjects they knew well.
These guides produced explainers, tutorials, definitions, tips, and answers that could stay useful for years.
That model helped About.com become one of the best-known information sites during the early years of the web.
Why did About.com become so popular?
About.com grew because people often reached its pages while searching the web for a clear answer to one specific question.
Many articles covered practical topics that people search for again and again, which gave the site a large collection of evergreen content.
Its age also gave many pages years to earn links, visibility, and strong positions in search results.
According to a Wired history of About.com, the site was still the sixteenth most-visited internet property in Comscore data from March 2014.
The strange part was that millions of people used About.com while few readers felt a strong bond with the About.com brand itself.
People often wanted the answer on a page, not a long visit through the rest of the website.
Who owned About.com?
About.com passed through several large media companies as publishers tried to turn its huge search audience into a lasting digital business.
Primedia bought the company during the dot-com era, and The New York Times Company later purchased it in 2005.
IAC then bought About.com from The New York Times Company in 2012 for about $300 million.
A review of the site's ownership history shows how its value changed as the wider internet changed around it.
The deals also show that About.com was more than a simple advice site because its search traffic made it a valuable media property.
Why did About.com disappear?
About.com did not vanish because people stopped asking questions, because the bigger problem was that the web had changed.
Search engines became smarter, smartphones changed reading habits, social platforms grew, and people increasingly trusted focused brands for important subjects.
A huge general website about almost everything could look less expert than a smaller website built around one clear topic.
CEO Neil Vogel and his team started breaking About.com into separate brands instead of trying to repair the old one-site model.
The company also removed weak material, updated useful articles, and redesigned content for specific kinds of readers.
TechCrunch reported in May 2017 that the old About.com structure was being replaced by standalone sites such as Verywell, Lifewire, The Balance, The Spruce, and ThoughtCo.
This was not just a new logo because the company changed how its information was grouped, presented, marketed, and discovered.
What replaced About.com?
On May 2, 2017, About.com officially became Dotdash after a long process of moving its best content into focused media brands.
An official announcement of the Dotdash change described the move as the end of a year-long shift from one general-interest site to separate vertical brands.
Verywell covered health, Lifewire covered technology, The Balance covered personal finance, The Spruce covered home topics, and ThoughtCo focused on education.
TripSavvy later joined the group for travel content.
The Dotdash name was mainly a company brand rather than a new version of About.com where readers would browse every topic together.
The strategy gave each subject its own identity while keeping the publishing knowledge and useful material created during the About.com years.
Where did the About.com business go after Dotdash?
Dotdash grew beyond the original About.com properties and later bought major publishing assets from Meredith in 2021.
The combined business became Dotdash Meredith and brought famous brands such as PEOPLE, Better Homes & Gardens, Travel + Leisure, and Allrecipes into the same publishing group.
In July 2025, Dotdash Meredith changed its public name again and became People Inc.
The People Inc. rebrand announcement even noted that the colored dot in its modern identity traces its history back to About.com.
This means About.com is gone as the familiar general information brand, but its corporate and publishing history continues inside a much larger media company.
What can modern website owners learn from About.com?
The main lesson from About.com is that having a huge amount of useful content does not guarantee that one broad brand will stay strong forever.
Readers want clear signals about who created an answer, why they can trust it, and whether the website truly understands the subject.
Focused sites can make those signals easier to see because their name, design, writers, and articles all serve the same kind of need.
About.com also shows why old content needs regular editing instead of being kept online only because it once attracted search traffic.
Its transformation worked by keeping useful knowledge while changing the structure around that knowledge.
That makes About.com an important internet case study because its end was not simply a failure, but a major shift from one giant portal toward many focused expert brands.