On Blogs and Business Models

Following up Blogging on Chess.com, I posted my second blog piece there: Kicking Chess.com's Tires. The Chess.com blog tools aren't built to the same standard as Blogger.com (the backend site for Blogspot.com), but they are very good and have certain chess-specific add-ons (that I haven't tried yet) to incorporate a chess position or a game.

That second Chess.com post discusses the reason for my move from About.com to Chess.com, especially since the About.com chess page currently looks like an advertisement for Chess.com. While I'm on the subject of advertising, if you're interested in knowing how the About.com business model works, it was explained in the 2007 Annual Report for the New York Times Company (NYSE:NYT).

'How About.com Generates Revenues'
(Source: NYT 2007 Annual Report, Form 10-K, p.6)

The screen capture shows a page from About's PC Hardware / Reviews. The look is the same that I captured for my post on Jiggly Ads. That look has since been superseded by About.com's Redesign, but the ad components are the same.

If you're thinking about investing in NYT stock, think again. I bought a few shares shortly after the Times acquired About.com in early 2005, and the stock has declined steadily from around $38 per share to its current price of $13 per share. I could say a lot more about this, but since this is a chess blog, not a media-watch or an investing blog, I'll stop here.