Interview: Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc. — Part I

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[Staci D. Kramer] In just three five years with the New York Times Company, Scott Meyer moved from VP, NYT Digital and GM, NYTimes.com to VP-strategic planning for the New England Media Group/Boston Globe and, unexpectedly last June, to president and CEO, About, Inc. Meyer was promoted to run the standalone unit when Peter Horan, who stayed with the company after it was sold by Primedia for $410 million and became part of NYTCO in March, left for AllBusiness.com. Meyer credits Horan for working with him through a six-week transition that helped him connect with a team full of About veterans.

During a 40-minute phone interview Wednesday, Meyer sounded like he’s been part of About all along. It helps that he came to NYTCO from the dot.com side of the tracks, where he was VP/GM of the B2C division at Multex.com (now part of Reuters). But he’s just as clearly a graduate of the NYTCO school of separating church and state, business and editorial. We talked about integrating About into NYTCO, joint advertising efforts, upcoming changes in content and design, the role of blogging, and driving traffic.
[] The audio can be downloaded here. Some excerpts:

Competition: “We’re a top 10 web site; from an advertising perspective that list of the top 10 is generally who we’re competing with for ad dollars. On the content spectrum, it depends on the site. Our auto channel competes with all of the top auto sites; our health channel competes with WebMD … and on down the line. ”

Design: The home page is the most visited page but that only represents about 5 percent of the traffic. “We’re fond of saying every page on About is a home page. For a lot of our visitors, they come to that guide to develop a relationship with the guide and that’s our best opportunity to introduce them to the richness of the rest of the About service.” As for a redesign, “Designs are never done. There’s just varying degrees of how major and with a site as big as ours … You’ve got to be careful. We want to keep pushing on the strengths — we have more women than iVillage, more men than Sportsline, more teens than MTV. … The designs that will appeal will be different.” He isn’t saying whether the site will offer design variations to appeal to different demographics.
Search: About continues to invest in search. Drawing on Mary Meeker’s “search, find, obtain” (SFO)maxim, “Increasingly, through partnerships like the one we have with PriceGrabber for comparison shopping or with Kayak for travel, we just did a deal with Indeed for vertical search in help wanted, we’re helping people obtain what they’re looking for.” (NYTCO and two other investors put $5 million into Indeed.com earlier this month.)

Content: About is doubling its editorial team from six to 12 and implementing — carefully — new content forms across the guides. Video continues to play an important role. Following a pilot this summer, About will introduce limited flash video and podcasts in September. The investment in guide training is increasing — in part, to add those features. Some user blogs are already in place, sharing experiences like pregnancy or quitting smoking and including photographs. Asked if About would be making a deal with a photo service, Meyer said he couldn’t talk about it.

Acquisition/Development: About is expanding services through a mix of partnerships, investments, acquisition and internal development. Meyer: “Being part of the Times company and the strong business results that we’ve had and continue to have, we’re accelerating the investment in the business. We’re in a good place to continue to put out a better and better web site. … The Times has been very acquisitive this year. We did the Indeed investment, we bought About, we did the joint venture in Boston Metro, the business paper in California. Growth through acquisitions and equity investment continue to become a more important part of the New York Times Company strategy.” About is most likely to invest within its top six categories: health, travel, autos, tech, entertainment and finance/small business.

Integration: Joint advertising sales and traffic/cross-promotion are the two key areas. The units are making joint sales pitches and submitting joint proposals. On the cross-promotion side, one of the most appealing aspects of the About transaction for NYTCO was the low duplication with the media sites. Together the sites have about 30 million uniques.
Asked about working together on the content side, Meyer replied carefully: “This was a business-side acquisition and one of the reasons that About is a good fit is we observe and respect the church-state … on the content side, we’re working together where it makes sense but that’s not one of the underlying reasons for the acquisition.” Cross-promotion is where About and the media sites come together on content. Meyer says the About promotion of NYTimes.com features like David Pogue’s tech videos and Tony Scott’s Movie Minutes dramatically increased their traffic. It can work both ways. “Increasingly, you’ll see us in other parts of the New York Times company. For instance, you’ll find About headlines on the site of our Huntsville, Ala., TV station.”
Related: Interview: Scott Meyer, President & CEO, About, Inc. — Part II: About & Blogging

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