Vogel arrives eight months after the New York Times Company sold About.com to IAC, an internet conglomerate best known for the Ask.com brand. Prior to the sale, About.com — which depends heavily on search for its traffic — suffered a drop in business when Google downgraded its content in its search algorithm.

In a phone interview, Vogel said the Google setback was overblown and About.com is humming along at a profitable pace on the basis of its traditional display and automated ad business. He also claimed that ad prices have stayed strong and that the existing “monetization model is very good.”

Vogel said his immediate plans are to grow traffic and to make the site flashier along the lines of BuzzFeed or Pinterest. He also says the site has great content but low name recognition.

“There’s clearly some design things to make this site more compelling,” he said, adding that there was a lot of potential on the “social side” but that the same social strategies don’t work for all content.

Whatever strategy Vogel chooses, he has no shortage of content with which to work. It will be interesting to see what a CEO with a show business streak does to spice up a website that covers everything from bankruptcy to baseball to Buddhism.

Reuters reported last Tuesday that Diller’s IAC/Interactive was making a late-stage bid for About.com, which was in the early stages of selling itself to Answers.com for $270 million. The New York Times reported on its Media Decoder blog on Sunday afternoon that the $300 million cash deal will be officially announced Monday.

The New York Times bought the About Group in 2005 for $410 million. ”About’s early expertise in search engine optimization, expert content and revenues from cost-per-click and display advertising made it a valuable component of our portfolio for the past seven years,” Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., NYT Company chairman, said in a statement. ”This sale will allow the Times Company to focus on the development and growth of our core brands locally, nationally and on a global scale.”

IAC, which is #32 on this year’s pc50 list of the world’s most successful digital media companies, has over 50 Internet businesses in 30 countries, including search sites Ask.com and Dictionary.com as well as online dating sites like Match.com, local listing sites like Citysearch and media sites like College Humor.

All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka, who originally broke the news that the NYT was selling off About.com, reports that Diller’s all-cash offer “helped sway the Times and its Allen & Co. bankers. Answers and its private equity backers Summit Partners and TA Associates were going to finance the deal with debt, and would have included equity in Answers as part of the transaction.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr / Jeff Howard

All Things Digital first reported the news. The NYT’s Media Decoder blog notes:

Last month, the Times Company took a $194.7 million write-down of About.com. The company purchased the Web site in 2005 for just over $400 million. In its latest earnings news release, the company said that About Group’s revenues declined 8.7 percent to $25.4 million, largely because of a drop in display and cost-per-click advertising.

At AdExchanger, David Kaplan notes that ”Answers.com’s president and COO is none other than Peter Horan, the former About.com head who helped engineer the sale of the About to the NYTCo in the first place.”

Earlier this year, the New York Times sold off its last shares in the Fenway Sports Group, and in December 2011 the NYT sold its regional papers to Halifax Media Group for $143 million. The company still owns the Boston Globe and International Herald Tribune.

Update, 1:34 PM: The New York Times confirmed this afternoon that “it is engaged in discussions regarding the potential sale of its About Group. No definitive agreement has been reached. The negotiations are ongoing and there can be no assurances that an agreement will be reached or that a transaction will be completed.”

But the company said favorable trends at About.com, particularly in cost-per-click advertising, helped improve digital advertising results and kept its overall advertising decline down compared to Q1. From Chairman and acting CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s statement: “Although we recorded a non-cash charge in the quarter, the About Group continues to execute on its turnaround strategy and we expect it to be on track to post continued meaningful improvement in the second half of the year.”

The About.com charge stole some of the afterglow from the Q2 sale of the company’s remaining shares in Fenway Sports Group for $63 million; the total sale over two years was $225 million.

Sans special items, NYTCo increased profit 6.5 percent to $78.1 million from $73.4 million and turned in earnings per share of 14 cents compared with 11 cents in Q211.

Digital circulation up

The company reported reported 532,000 paid digital subscribers across its News media Group, up 13 percent from 472,000 at the end of Q1. The company attributes the uptick to its decision to cut the number of NYTimes.com free articles in half (as Sulzberger puts it: “our decision to move the gate on NYTimes.com from 20 to 10 free articles a month”) and to a marketing push.

The digital circ is reported in two clusters:

• the NYT and International Herald Tribune had roughly 509,000 subscriptions for digital packages, e-readers and replica editions at the end of Q2, up 12 percent from Q1.

the Boston Globe, which launched pay site BostonGlobe.com in the fall is slowly adding subscribers, hitting 23,000 for the site and e-reader/replica editions, up 28 percent from Q1. It may be tempting to compare its progress to that of NYTimes,com but it would be a mistake. It’s a smaller paper and a different model.

Digital advertising

As mentioned above. About.com is credited for stemming the overall digital advertising revenue decline — but decline is still the operative word and About.com played a big part in that. Excluding the writedown, About.com operating profit dropped 30.4 percent to $10.2 million from $14.6 million, while advertising revenues dipped 8.7 percent to $25.4 million from $27.8 million on display and cost-per-click declines.

Digital advertising increased as a percentage of overall ad revenues for NYTCo to 31.4 percent from 30.5 percent in Q211. Digital now accounts for nearly one-fourth of the News Media Group’s advertising revenues. Total NYTCo digital ad revenues dropped four percent to $76.7 million from $79.9 million, while the News Media Group kept it to a 1.6 percent dip.

The earnings webcast is at 11 a.m. EDT.

The article, A New York Times Whodunnit, is plump with gossip but also drives home the crucial business challenges the Times must address sooner than later, exploring the infamous exit of former CEO Janet Robinson, who pocketed $24 million after her sudden departure last December.

• The piece reveals how the rapid shrinking of the New York Times Company has led to a financial and management crisis for the family who runs it.
• The Ochs-Sulzberger clan, we learn, is under strain from dwindling dividends and a dearth of prestige positions for family members to assume.
• It was this backdrop that helped fuel the clashes between Robinson and the girlfriend of publisher Arthur ­Sulzberger Jr. which was the ostensible reason for Robinson’s sudden firing.
• Overall, though, the article makes clear that the “other woman” narrative is just a symptom and not the cause of the Times’ troubles.

Here are three key takeaways for the New York Times Company, whose share price has been lagging the market by nearly 25 percent:

1. NYT Co desperately needs a CEO 

On an April earnings call, one analyst pressed Sulzberger directly about the the company’s CEO search and asked if he would take on the role himself. Sulzberger demurred but everyone else appears to be fed up with the company’s rudderless leadership. In April, a leaked email from a Times reporter blasted the “ghost ship” and took Sulzberger to task for palling around with a series of mountain-climbing gurus rather than running the company.

The New York magazine article reveals that the strategic crisis may be more acute than imagined due to internal divisions over the Times’ critically-important digital initiatives. The article reveals that the Times’ controversial pay wall gambit was actually Robinson’s baby and that Sulzberger instead favored the open strategy of the paper’s longtime digital veteran, Martin Nisenholtz. Now both Robinson and Nisenholtz are gone, meaning Sulzberger will have to find a new evangelist for the pay wall religion he apparently doesn’t share or else carry out a strategic pivot.

2. The Boston Globe and About.com are distractions

The New York Times Company has been shedding assets, including regional newspapers and a stake in the Boston Red Sox, to buttress its cash reserves. The moves make sense but also raise questions about how much longer the company will keep its other properties. While the Times has been talking up the digital makeover of BostonGlobe.com, the site only has 18,000 paid subscribers, which seems frightfully low, even considering the site’s recent launch date.

The New York magazine article also makes it clear that the Boston property has been a pawn at the mercy of the company’s rival fiefdoms. Likewise, revenues at the Times’ one-time cash cow, About.com, have declined significantly (though it is still profitable) and the how-to site appears to be more of a distraction than a key element of any New York Times turnaround plan.

This is not to disparage either the Boston Globe or About.com but simply to point out that they are languishing under Sulzberger. He or a new CEO must take steps soon to shape them up or sell them.

3. Mayor Mike Bloomberg could save the Times

The New York magazine article concluded with the tantalizing suggestion that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a likely candidate to swoop in and rescue the Times. Other media outlets have already egged him on with pieces like The Atlantic Wire’s “Everyone Wants Mayor Bloomberg to Buy the New York Times.”

The speculation makes a ton of sense  - and not only because Bloomberg will be unemployed next year and in possession of a personal fortune worth at least $22 billion. The purchase would also make strategic and business sense.

Recall that Bloomberg’s eponymous financial company also has extensive media experience. While an actual merger would be a non-starter, the New York Times could contribute valuable data to the existing Bloomberg platform while retaining its editorial autonomy.

Michael Bloomberg would also be a better fit to lead the Times than other rumored candidates (like Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim) and, in any case, would also certainly be an improvement over the status quo.

The new figures come at a time when the New York Times Company is trying to forge a digital strategy based on high quality content and the prestige of its flagship brand. About’s problems could present a distraction as NYT Co seeks to implement that strategy.

Looking at the company today, it’s hard to recall that About.com was once one of the hottest properties on the web. When the NYT Co paid $410 million to acquire the site in 2005, it reportedly beat out other media giants like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Time (NYSE: TWX) Warner.

Despite the stiff price tag, the purchase for a time looked shrewd as About.com generated steady profits while growing its revenues from $80.2 million in 2006 to $136 million in 2010.

This growth, however, was fueled in part by the acquisition of niche sites like ConsumerSeach.com which the NYT Co bought for $33 million in 2007. Perhaps tellingly, the company had to write down the value of that site last quarter. It also divested another site that was part of the About group, UcompareHealth, early in 2011.

The biggest worry, though, is that the decline of About.com itself may be irreversible. Fewer people are clicking on About ads placed by Google and the site’s own display ads have dropped in value.

The company has attributed this decline in value to Google’s decision last year to downgrade About pages in its search results. With more than 80% of traffic coming from search, the Google denigration was indeed a blow but About’s problems may be rooted in something deeper.

Namely, it’s unclear if About is still viable as a brand. While the company launched a marketing campaign in 2010 to differentiate it from other “how-to” sites, there’s little evidence the message resonated with users. While readers may seek out individual About “guides,” the 80% search traffic figure reflects how About remains a detour not a destination for the vast majority of visitors.

These fortuitous attributes appear to conflict with the NYT Co.’s strategy of building a digital brand around famous, high-quality content.

On yesterday’s earnings call, New York Times executives responded to analysts’ skepticism by noting that About is in the process of reinvigorating its sales force under a new management team. The company appointed long-time CFO Darline Jean to take over the CEO job last July after her predecessor was forced out after a three-year stint.

If there’s a bright side, it’s that About reportedly has 60 million unique monthly visitors and that, for now, it is still profitable. But going forward, it’s hard to see About reacquiring its former cachet anytime soon.

A New York Times executive mentioned the move on the earnings call Thursday. On the call, Chief Financial Officer Jame Follo said advertisers were enthusiastic about the idea of making both the tech and health blogs more attractive to a business-to-business audience. In the case of Bits, launched last November, the company is aiming to challenge the preeminence of the Wall Street Journal’s ‘All Things D‘ among technophiles.

The call followed the release of earnings this morning that showed ongoing declines in NYT Co.’s overall revenues and profits.

On the call, Follo also pointed to a series of features designed to entice users to pay for digital content. These include one-click subscriptions in iTunes, free Kindle and Nook access for subscribers, and group accounts for corporate and educational users.

In response to analysts’ questions about the company’s announced 20% quarterly increase in digital subscribers, Follo said the total number of 390,000 included figures for online readers of the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and The Boston Globe. About 57,000 of the subscribers came via e-readers (this figure doesn’t account for new holiday subscribers).

The new Boston Globe site, which was launched in October, has 16,000 subscribers while the IHT has about 10,000.

Follo added that while many new subscribers were offered a 99 cent introductory rate for the first month, the “conversion rate is very strong.”

The company also enjoyed its first increase in home delivery in five years. In 2012, it raised subscriber prices by 4% and newsstand prices by 50 cents.

Despite its growing online subscriber base, the NYT Co still faces significant strategic challenges as print advertising declined 7.9% from the same quarter a year ago. Analysts also expressed concern about the dismal showing of the company’s About.com unit where digital revenues fell by 25% and overall profit by 67%. Executives said the decline was due to a fall-off in prices and click-through rates and by About.com’s content being downgraded in Google’s search algorithm.

Chairman and chief executive officer Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., said the company is still in the early stages of a search to replace former CEO Janet Robinson who was fired in December.

The NYT Co numbers, announced this morning, showed operating profit for Q4 declined to $106.6 million compared to $111.6 million for the same period a year ago. Revenues fell to $643 million, a 2.8% drop off.

The company’s earnings were $0.39 per share which is lower than the $0.41 analysts had predicted. The number reflects one-off charges, including severance costs tied to former CEO Janet Robinson who was forced out in December. Without the special charges, the company would have posted earnings of $0.45 per share.

In the bigger picture, the announcement reflects the familiar story of a newspaper property facing advertising declines that have yet to be offset by new digital dollars.

Revenue from print advertising fell 7.8% and digital advertising revenues dropped too — by 4.9%.

The drop in digital revenues would be a cause for alarm but for the fact that they stem from a drop in cost-per-click and display advertising at the About.com group.

If About.com is excluded, digital revenues at the New Media Group (which includes core properties like the Times) grew by 10% to $233.5 million.

Also encouraging is a 20% increase in digital subscribers which coincides with an expanded use of paywalls at the company.

Total paid subscribers to digital subscription packages, e-readers and replica editions of The Times and the International Herald Tribune totaled approximately 390,000 at the end of the year. The Boston Globe equivalents had 16,000 paid subscribers.

The numbers did not reflect the company’s recent sale of its Regional Media Group of sixteen newspapers in the south. The sale will result in proceeds of about $150 million, including tax benefits, which the company is expected to use to further its digital strategy.

In morning trading, NYT Co shares were off about 1.3% to $7.57.

paidContent will have more analysis following an earnings call that is taking place later this morning.

Nisenholtz would not discuss the specific “internal issues” about why the company felt Irvine needed to be let go. (Irvine declined to comment for this article.) The basic argument against Irvine was that she was not a “product-oriented” executive and that she was not creative enough in terms of finding ways to build up the guide sites as individual destinations — though several observers said Irvine’s creativity was constrained by financial pressures. Either way, with the declines extending into Q2 and probably into Q3, ultimately, the NYTCo felt they needed to react, given the importance of the About brand — comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) Media Metrix says About.com reached 42 million uniques visitors in the United States and 75.6 million uniques visitors worldwide in December 2010 — and its position as a prime source of revenue.

“We’ve said that we’re not opening a CEO search at this time,” says Nisenholtz, who also helmed About with McCoy in between the time Scott Meyer suddenly left as CEO in February 2008 and Irvine took on the job that July. “I’m very excited to be back involved in the day-to-day running of About. You have to remember that About has reported to me since we acquired the company in March 2005.”

About’s decline started in Q4. Before that, About, which in addition to its main guide site About.com, also includes ConsumerSearch and Calorie-Count, posted a 12.4 percent revenue gain for 2010 — itself, a turnaround from 2009. The decline in Q4 was only 3 percent. But About’s revenues dropped 10.2 percent to $31.1 million in Q1 — and Q2 has been trending similarly, executives have said.

Too much reliance on search: One of the chief causes of About’s recent stumble is the change in Google’s search algorithm. About largely has been able to avoid being pegged as a “content farm” thanks to the fact that its guides are considered experts in their field and are not simply crafting posts around popular keyword searches. That said, when About was coping with the loss of display advertising, it began to rely more on cost-per-click ads and the search traffic that brought users to them. In hindsight, there may have been too much reliance on CPC ads, as according to the NYTCo’s annual report (pdf), these ads represented 57 percent of the unit’s total revenues.

Doubling down on guides: Nisenholtz feels that too much has been made of the change in Google’s algorithm as the cause of About’s troubles.

“Look, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) is not in the business of distributing websites,” Nisenholtz says. “Google is in the business of giving great search results to users’ queries. Our job is to make sure our content is as good as it can possibly be. That’s the point. That’s what I mean by doubling down on the core — making sure we have the best quality content and guides. We are going to double down on the guides and the guide sites. As we do that, I suspect we’re going to see a positive change in terms of our volume metrics. In some ways, we’ve gotten away from that the last couple of years. Now, we have to get back to it. “

Guide sites as destinations: While About’s business is still relatively healthy, the 10.2 percent decline was like being hit in the head with a two-by-four and executives felt they needed to make a change fast. Irvine was regarded as a strong manager and administrator who was able to keep a large number of staffers together, including many who had been at the company for the better part of a decade — though there have been some key departures, including Marjorie Martin, the former GM of About Health who left for *AOL* and is now headed to Canyon Ranch; Dae Mellencamp, formerly SVP, product management and now a GM at Vimeo; and Sheryl Goldstein, former ad sales head and now chief revenue officer at a company called House Party.

Prior to About, Irvine was chief administrative officer at Publicis Groupe interactive shop, Digitas, and had held GM posts at Hearst New Media & Technology and New York Sidewalk. As such, she was given fairly high marks by a number of observers for initiating several branding campaigns designed to build up display advertising among media buyers.

In the weeks before being pushed out, Irvine unveiled a plan to add 200 more guides to the current 800 About contracts with. Plus, the company had just introduced a Spanish version to reach that growing segment. But to NYTCo executives, that was too little, too late and didn’t address the main problem — the sense that About had drifted from putting more emphasis on the guides.

Building franchises: The guide sites are like franchisees in a restaurant chain. They’re given the basic infrastructure and the general parameters of the business, but otherwise, the corporation puts them in charge of their own output and promotions. For the most part, About and its guide sites are not destinations. As Irvine told me last year, roughly 80 percent of About’s traffic come from search. There was a desire to see the About guides become the top two or three in their respective category but that has proved to be a struggle, since the guides are largely independent.

The company tried to build some buzz for its sites by bringing in celebrities as “expert guides,” such as chef Wolfgang Puck, county singer Faith Hill, NBA point guard Nate Robinson, and actress Marlee Matlin. But those were a small part of the traffic and those celebs didn’t really commit to their sites. Plus, it was seen as diffusing About’s mission of having singular guides providing regular posts. For example, About has an “American Food Guide,” John Mitzewich, who’s been with About since 2007, so bringing in a famous chef may dilute his value to a degree.

Instead, what About observers feel the company should have been doing was trying to make Mitzewich and his counterparts in other categories more well known. Or, at the very least, getting the guides to associate themselves more as representatives of About through their Twitter feeds and other social media outlets.

The payback: While some have faulted Irvine for not being inventive enough or focused on building new products, others say that she may have been constrained from putting the necessary investments back in the business because, despite its healthy margins last year, the NYTCo needed that revenue for other things.

For example, in October, Bloomberg reported that the NYTCo was in a position to pay back the $250 million loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim by 2012 — three full years ahead of schedule. There is a perception that the the NYTCo needed every available penny to pay down that debt more quickly, and therefore Irvine was limited in her ability to be creative in addressing About’s growth.

Nisenholtz emphatically denies this — and About insiders were at great pains to say that the NYTCo has been very supportive of the company even during the recession. “There’s no relationship between paying down the loan and investing in the business,” Nisenholtz says. “Just take a look at our balance sheet. Our investment in About has by no means been modest. Over the years, we’ve expanded it to China, we’ve bought three companies and built a sales and marketing department from scratch.”

In addition, Nisenholtz mentions the recent support for the 200 guides and the creation of the new Spanish site as evidence that the company has heavily backed About. He declined to venture any thoughts about how soon a turnaround might occur, saying only “It’s too early to say when we’re going to turn it around, but we’re going to try to do it as soon as possible.”

McCoy returns: The general consensus at About is that this isn’t a troubled property. For one thing, the declines starting in Q4 are being compared to the burst of activity that occurred when the advertising spending snapped back. The feeling is that it just needs some minor tweaks and the double digit revenue gains it had enjoyed last year will materialize again. The company isn’t expected to do any other dismissals or layoffs, at least not anytime soon. Neither is it expected to start getting heavily into mobile — thought its ConsumerSearch property just introduced a new mobile wap site — which is still not a major ad revenue producer for most media companies.

The main idea really is as simple as returning About to its roots, and as such, Nisenholtz is placing a lot of the turnaround on McCoy, who first started with About in 1998, when it was owned by Primedia (NYSE: PRM). Before that, McCoy was CTO for Cox Interactive Media following a stint in the early 1990s at the company’s Atlanta Journal and Constitution. He has been credited as one of the people behind About’s technology — and though the Google algorithm issue is not the only reason for About’s predicament, the sense is that he’s the best person to help resolve that.

“Ron is a superb technologist, a good friend of mine and someone who I’ve worked really well with in the past,” Nisenholtz says. “He’s also a very good business person and he understands this company extremely well.”

In a staff memo, Nisenholtz said that he would be retaining his current corporate position as he extends his role to the About Group, which includes the main guide site About.com, ConsumerSearch and Calorie-Count. The company sold About’s UCompareHealthCare.com unit to MDxMedical in Februrary.

After a no-frills thank you to Irvine, Nisenholtz wrote: “My goal is to build on this incredible About franchise, leveraging the hundreds of passionate, independent guides and the collective intellect of the many talented employees within the business unit.”

Revenues stumble: The executive change comes amid three consecutive quarterly revenue declines at About, which was partially attributed to changes in Google’s search algorithm. The company’s traffic is heavily dependent on search, though display had been trending down as well.

Despite the recent stumbles, About had a pretty strong year in 2010, with revenues rising 12.4 percent at the unit. But despite the continuing ad recovery, Q4 saw a mild decline in revenues of around 3 percent. Things grew worse in Q1, as About revenues dropped 10.2 percent to $31.1 million. That trend is expected to continue into Q2.

The turnaround plan: A day before the NYTCO’s Q1 earnings report last month, I met with Irvine to discuss her plans for addressing the declines. “We’re making a significant expansion in our content and doubling down on video,” Irvine said at the time. Specifically, she said the over the course of the year, About would be adding 200 more guide sites for a total of 1,000. It’s also introducing a Spanish-language version to appeal to that growing demographic and the advertisers who want to reach them. In terms of video, About had been planning on doing more video and with special promotions on YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG).

Irvine’s approach: About had seen dark times before, particularly in 2009. Irvine stepped into the job at About in July 2008, roughly two months before the global financial meltdown halted the growth of online advertising.

She had been the chief administrative officer of interactive shop Digitas before she was selected to succeed Scott Meyer (currently CEO or Evidon) as About’s CEO. Meyer had stepped down in February of that year; Nisenholtz had taken the CEO reins in the interim.

As the economy and ad spending tanked, About sought to balance display with cost-per-click ads. In an interview with paidContent in August ’09, Irvine described her approach. “We have done some things to enhance the CPC offering. We have optimized some pages by adding an extra link or two for CPC advertising, for example. But those changes have mainly been around the edges, as opposed to a wholesale strategic shift. Think of it as tweaking, with an eye toward what is going to work best in the current environment.”

The latest turnaround: By focusing on the Hispanic audience, Irvine said she saw a way to build on a small segment of About’s audience. “Today, there are about 30 million U.S. Hispanics and we currently serve about 3.5 percent of them, mostly women,” Irvine said. “With the tremendous growth of that group over the next few years, it made sense to focus a lot more on building a relationship there. The good news is that we serve enough of that audience to observe them and see what they want. The goal is that by offering a dedicated site for them within the About umbrella, it would establish a foundation for continual growth over the years. You can’t just look quarter to quarter.”