This client want to know all about About. About.com, that
is. Traffic, revenue, business model, advertisers, site 'guides', the works.
Here's a bit of what we were able to tell them:
Monthly traffic
In 2005, about.com had an average of:
--29.3 million monthly unique visitors in the United States
--42.6 million monthly unique visitors worldwide
In April of 2006, these numbers had increased to 31 million, US, and
48 million, worldwide
Monthly revenue
About.com had revenues of about $2.2 million a month for the first half
of 2005. By 2006, revenues had almost tripled, to almost $6.4 million.
Revenue per visitor
Each visitor to about.com generates:
2005: $2.2 million / 42.6 million = 5.16 cents
per visitor
2006: $6.4 million / 42.6 million = 15.02 cents
per visitor
Biggest contributors to revenue stream
cost-per-click revenue: $3.39 million
display ad revenue:
$2.69 million
e-commerce revenue: $0.32 million
Biggest advertisers
Best Buy , Disney, Verizon, SBC, Intel, Visa, GE, Wal-Mart, Vonage,
Pfizer.
Among their newest heavy hitters are:
Microsoft, Nissan, Honda, American Express
Where does their traffic come from?
The vast bulk of their traffic -- about 80% -- comes directly from search
engine result pages. Only 5% of their visitors head directly to the about.com homepage
Sites and Guides
About.com has 500 main sites, each led by a Guide, i.e., a subject matter
expert. Within the main sites are sub-topics, and there are more than 57,000 total topics at about.com, with more than
1.3 million pieces of original content.
The average Guide earns $15,000/yr. Fifty Guides earn more than
$50,000 and a handful are earning $100,000 or more.
To read the full Q&A, click here.
Laslty, here are links to a few Google Knols I've written, in case anyone is interested in having a look:
