from Silicon Alley Reporter on Miningco.com change to About.com:
NEWS
MiningCo.com Becomes About.com, Launches $10 Million Marketing
Campaign
by Stacy Cowley
After a $75 million IPO less than six weeks ago, Web directory
MiningCo.com (Nasdaq: MINE) has relaunched as About.com. The company
also stepped forward to claim credit for a series of cryptic ads with
the tagline "Hello, is anybody out there?" that have been popping up
in newspapers, on television, online and on buildings since the
beginning of May.
CEO Scott Kurnit says the company has done "a dozen monumental
things" in the past few weeks to prepare for the name change,
including acquiring some 3000 "about" URLs--aboutchat.com,
abouttalk.com, aboutsports.com, aboutpregnancy.com, and so on. Kurnit
says the URLs won't be activated, or even redirected to About.com any
time in the near future, but the company wanted access to them before
it began its rebranding campaign. Part of About.com's rebranding
strategy is to emphasize its 18 channels, which Kurnit says will now
have "their own identity" for the first time, as AboutNews,
AboutSports, AboutShopping, etc.
MiningCo.com's management decided to rename the company because "we
learned, as we started our next wave of marketing, that the public
really liked the original content and community on the site, but that
the mining metaphor didn't go where we wanted it to. It isn't the
metaphor we want for the next 20 years," Kurnit says."As we were
about to spend some real marketing money, we figured this is the time
to make the change."
MiningCo.com is the second high-profile site to change its name
within the last week, following on the heels of Deja News's relaunch
as Deja.com. It's one of the first to make such a change after going
public, however; the company's Nasdaq ticker symbol will change from
MINE to BOUT this Thursday. Kurnit says the company considered
changing names before its IPO but held back to avoid spooking the
bankers. Waiting until after the offering also gave the company the
advantage of the additional capital raised in the offering, some of
which is being used for the site's first major marketing campaign.
About.com has shelled out around $1 million for a series of teaser
ads, which debuted May 3, and expects to spend $10 million more on
marketing in the next 45 to 60 days. Created by Alley-based Eisnor
Interactive, the teasers include a 15-second television commercial
that ran during Fraiser and ER last week, radio spots, and print ads
in newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times,
and the San Mercury Jose News. But it's the company's "guerilla
marketing" ads that have been attracting serious attention--the
"Hello, is anybody out there?" slogan has been turning up in odd
places around New York City, including the side of the Flatiron
building.
Keeping the marketing campaign and the name change secret has been
another of those "monumental things" Kurnit mentioned. To avoid
disclosing the company's identity while acquiring URLs and making
advertising buys for the teaser campaign, About.com created several
shell companies--Hola Industries is the InterNIC contact for many of
About.com's new domains.
The company's 600 guides were also kept in the dark about the changes
until 4 p.m. yesterday because of legal concerns about information
that could affect the company's stock price. Concern about leaks was
also an issue, Kurnit acknowledges. "With a diverse work force like
the guides, there's no way it would have stayed quiet," he says. "We
had to wait until the market closed on Friday before we could do
anything."
The name change has been under consideration for over a year
according to Kurnit. The company bought the About.com domain last
spring from a private individual for what Kurnit says was "under
$100,000," but the decision to go ahead with the change wasn't made
until a month ago. "MiningCo is a great name, but it's not nearly as
extensible," he explains. "You can hardly utter a sentence without
saying 'about.'"
The company, which has been known until now for its original content
and "human directory," hopes to challenge the portal sites more
directly by building out additional features. MiningCo.com ranked
24th on Media Metrix's list of the most-visited websites in March
1999, well behind major portals such as Yahoo! (#2), Go (#4), and
Lycos (#9). Kurnit remains unfazed in his conviction that About.com
can capture the #1 spot. "Yahoo! became great because it had a core
product that blew away Infoseek and Lycos and added sevices around
that," he says. "And our core product blows Yahoo! away."
Contact: Mark Josephson; markj@about.com, 212-849-2185
about.com
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