A major influence for us, as founders of Know More Media, was our association with About.com, including their acquisition of Freeservers.com, which we owned.  In this process of shopping Freeservers, we also became acquainted with another key influencer for us, Jeff Jarvis.

Freeservers had grown very quickly.  We had been monetizing the traffic by selling banner ads, but for the most part, we were only able to sell run-of-network traffic at much lower CPM rates.

In the fall of 1999, we were approached by About.com.  Over the next few months, Hal oversaw the negotiations with Scott Kurnit and his team and in December of 1999, we sold NorthSky, Inc. to About.com for a stock purchase that was valued at about $44 million.

A week after we signed a letter of intent with About.com, which included a “no-look” clause - meaning we couldn't shop the company to anyone else - we were approached by Jeff Jarvis regarding Advance Publication's possible interest in acquiring us.  We came to really like Jeff and found his thinking to be much more in line with ours, but we were committed to About and continued to ride that train.  We wondered how things would have gone if timing had been a little different.  Jeff Jarvis has always been kind to us, willing to talk and give counsel, and someone who we greatly respect. His approach to combining technology, publishing, and community resonated with us.

Hal (and later Rich) worked as the General Manager of About Web Services, reporting to Scott Kurnit and later Bill Day.  We came to learn quite a bit about the About model of online niche publication managed by an expert guide.   About did a great job of interlinking all of their topics and articles, and the search engines rewarded them for it.  We didn't like the cluttered style of their sites, and it seemed like there was a lot of dissatisfaction among their Guides.  One common complaint seemed to be that About was constantly changing their Guide compensation model.

I thought there was great promise with the purchase of About by Primedia, but the potential never materialized.  It seemed like there wasn't any integration between the niche print publications of Primedia with the online niche sites run by About.  It always seemed like Primedia was approaching all the online sites from a traditional media approach, and it never really worked very well.

This experience with About and our association with Jeff Jarvis have provided one of the corners in our foundation as we have built Know More Media.  We like the power of allowing experts and professionals to write about what they know best; we realize we could increase advertising revenue by providing targeted and segmented audiences to our advertisers; we see that traditional media really struggles with this online world of publishing.  From all of this and with the great blogging tools available, we see that we can build an online publishing company that focuses on business, with the content written by experts from all over, and we can build something of value for readers.