Mike reports on bidding war for about.com:

"It appears that Primedia is looking to sell About.com. Primedia, of course, seriously overpaid for About.com a few years back and then did very little with it, other than to make it less and less useful, on the theory that if they put more and more ads on it, it would somehow pay for itself, rather than driving users away. Especially in an age of blogs, the whole reason for About.com seems to make less and less sense. However, apparently some people think it's actually worth between $350 and $500 million -- which is almost scary. The article says that Google, Yahoo, askjeeves, the New York Times (who, it appears, broke the story) and AOL are all bidding for the site."

about.com has around 750 topics actually. Each of them return an average US$ 1500 per month. Brings us to $ 13.5 mio a year in revenues. $350 mio would be a multiple of 25. That would be quite steep.

Also interesting this related note from Fred Wilson - Commercial Blogging - about.com 2.0? I fully agree with this - that's what we said in the founding post for Creative Weblogging :-)