The Four

It’s not fair to say that the Times wasn’t an innovator. It was, and it
became a leading site, with arresting graphics, data features, and
video. But much of the online growth at the Times was as a collection
of mediocre content engineered to capture clicks on Google (through
About.com). Similar to birds in Africa that sit on a rhino’s ass all day
long eating mites and ticks, the Times was riding on the back of a titan,
one of the Four. The folks at the Times didn’t suspect it, but living on
Google’s search algorithm is a tenuous existence. It takes just one flick
of the rhino’s tail to knock the scavenging bird off.
The Times paid $400 million for About.com and, as the About
sites harvested billions of clicks from Google searches, the purchase
briefly looked deft. By the time I was aboard, the market value for
About had risen to about $1 billion. About.com was hot property.
I lobbied to sell, or spin it by taking it public. Naturally, people in
the About group thought this was a fabulous idea. They were sick of
propping up an analog company and hungry for internet equity and
respect. At one point, I made a serious faux pas: at a meeting where
About’s senior management was present, I suggested selling the
company or taking it public. This was irresponsible on my part. It was
like screaming to a room full of seven-year-old boys, “Who wants to go
to Monster Jam?” when you’re not sure you can get tickets.
However, Janet and Arthur didn’t want to lose their online cred.
They were busy using About as digital earrings to accessorize an
analog outfit. It showed investors and the board (minus me) that the
Times did have a digital strategy, one that was bringing in revenue and
was poised to grow. They weren’t closing their eyes to the future, they
told themselves, but embracing it. Digital was bringing in only 12
percent of company revenue. Selling About would cause that number
to shrink, and we might look like a newspaper company.
Meanwhile, I was pushing at board meetings for the company to
shut off Google’s access to Times content. I could see that Google’s
search engine already was destroying shareholder value. If left
unchecked, it would slowly and methodically asphyxiate us. Everybody
else believed it was the electricity of the internet age and that the
relationship was symbiotic, as in exchange for our content, we got
traffic from Google.