On Monday, The New York Times Company is expected to announce that it has sold the About Group, which includes the expert site About.com, to Barry Diller's IAC/Interactive for $300 million in cash, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations who declined to be identified before the official announcement.
IAC/Interactive made a surprise bid of $300 million last week, after it had been widely assumed that the Times would sell About to Answers.com for a reported $270 million. But as he has many times in the past, Mr. Diller won the day for IAC/Interactive, the company he has built out of a shopping basket of Web sites and services like Match.com, Ask.com and The Daily Beast.
About.com is a collection of individual sites devoted to particular topics like cooking, travel and pregnancy that are curated by individual experts. The Times bought the About group in 2005 for just over $400 million and the company contin ued to perform well under new ownership, garnering top search results and attracting advertising. But changes in Google's search algorithm in 2011 punished About.com, which has sometimes been criticized for failing to have content as compelling as its search optimization.
As its search results on Google tumbled, advertising also fell. Revenue at the group fell in the most recent quarter by 8.7 percent to $25.4 million and the Times announced it was taking a writedown of $194.7 million on About.
The sale is the latest in a series of sales the Times Company has made in the past few years, shedding assets to focus primarily on The New York Times brand. It recently sold its remaining stake in the Fenway Sports Group, owner of the Boston Red Sox, and in January it sold its regional newspaper group to Halifax Media Holdings for $143 million.
IAC/Interactive is expected to incorporate its latest acquisition into its array of information sites like Ask.com, which t he company is attempting to remake into a question-and-answer site based around online community.
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