Umbrella media business Dotdash is launching a new millennial paint line with Amazon, as it continues to boost its growing commerce arm.
The company is similar to its earlier incarnation, the how-to repository, About.com, but instead now houses how-to “content destinations.”
Dotdash owns a roster of verticals like Verywell (health), The Balance (finance), and The Spruce (home decor), which is helming its new interior paint line, Dotdash’s first D2C product.
Cool… we really just wanna know what happened to About.com
If you ever asked your computer how to change your oil or, “Hey, what’s this weird bump in my belly button?” chances are you’ve used About.com.
It was a member of the search engine golden age of the mid-’90s along with Ask Jeeves and Yahoo. But About didn’t pawn inquisitors off into the search matrix like the others.
They hired real experts to write how-tos and explainers on basically anything you could think to ask. In time, the search engine renaissance faded (unless your name rhymes with doogle). But About lived on, and it stayed schoolin’ until the bitter end.
It was still the 16th-most-visited site on the internet in 2014
Despite maintaining profitability, About’s CEO killed it in 2017 and rebranded it as “network of stuff 2.0” — AKA Dotdash.
Cut to 2 years later and the how-to network is expecting to bring in roughly $150m in revenue.
