The New York Times' purchase of About.com makes it official, content is back in charge on the Web.
Internet.com's article, "NY Times: It's All About.com", states:
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About.com's model is a precursor to blogs. Its 500 paid experts manage topic-centric Web portals that combine original content with Web links. Primedia, the publisher of 300 products, brought in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2003. But it failed to find synergy between the Web product and its magazines.
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It's nice to know that someone's making money with About.com, because the Guides (content mavens) certainly aren't:
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Q. Do I get paid for this?
A. Guide compensation is based on page views. Each Guide is assigned a unique page view rate for each thousand page views the site gets each a month. No matter what their page view rate is, Guides get paid a minimum of $500 for their first full-month on the network and are guaranteed at least $500 as long as they increase page views each month.
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If you want to be a Guide, the time commitment is NOT small:
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Q. What's the time commitment?
A. Most Guides estimate that it takes them between 10-20 hours per week to keep their sites up to our high standards. Many Guides put in additional hours because they tell us it is hard to make a clear line between "work" and "play". We make it as easy as possible for Guides by providing tools that are structured and easy to use, yet flexible enough to let your creativity shine through.
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