NY Times discusses About.com acquisition (quotes from the conf call)

NY Times CEO Janet Robinson, EVP Digital Ops Martin Nisenholz and CFO Len Forman discuss their company's acquisition of About.com for $410 million:

About.com will strengthen and diversify the Company's on-line advertising base, adding a significant and highly profitable cost-per-click advertising business, as well as impression-based display advertising. More than half of its revenues come from cost-per-click advertising... will also extend the Times Company’s reach among Internet users. The Company will be the 12th largest entity on the Internet with the addition of About.com's 22 million monthly users to our already significant base of 13 million users. This scale is important as we compete for market share in readership and advertising.

Last year ad revenues rose 38 percent at our new news media group websites.

According to PRIMEDIA, the purchase price of 410 million reflects a multiple of about ten times About, Inc's 2004 revenues and a multiple of over 30 times About Inc segment EBITDA. Based on The Times Company projections, the transaction reflects a multiple of 23 times estimated 2005 About EBITDA…compares well to the multiples for other recently completed Internet acquisitions,such as CBS MarketWatch. We anticipate the acquisition will be accretive to earnings in 2007.

Google supplies the sponsored links that appear on About's content pages, and we expect this relationship to continue.

This is a business with 80 people.

(Quotes are from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)