About’s 40.4 percent Q205 revenue boost — numbers are estimates because Primedia’s bookkeeping and that of the New York Times Company differ — comes from an uptick in display ads, increased click for pay, a small amount of e-commerce and some other revenue. Martin Nisenholtz, SVP-digital operations, said he believes NYTCO is the second-largest revenue relationship Google has, adding, “We are a very large player in that new revenue stream going forward.”
Not only is About.com contributing to the New York Times Company’s bottom line, its search engine optimization is being implemented across the company. Nisenholtz offered NYTimes.com’s job market listings as an example of an area that has been revamped to push it ahead in the search listings. Both Nisenholtz and President and CEO Janet Robinson mentioned NYTCO’s standing as the 11th largest content provider online now that About is part of the equation; Nisenholtz said that if you leave out the e-commerce and government sites, the company has been either number one or number two for the last three months. “We can leverage that very large audience and we’re doing that increasingly across a broad number of clients,” Nisenholtz said, adding that About and Times Digital recently went on joint sales calls in Chicago on consumer-package-good accounts. Another example: the Times’ strength in entertainment is being leveraged across About.
CFO Leonard Foreman chimed in, “Part of the growth that the New York Times and About.com are experiencing are a result of the symbiotic relationship between these two companies and it’s why we, when we made this acquisition, felt quite comfortable with the amount of the valuation. We feel that over time you’ll begin to recognize this has turned out to be a pretty good deal.”
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