A week or so ago we reported that About.com was to be put up for auction and that the major search players and NYT were to bid.

the New York Times won, at a cost of $410M

The New York Times Co. on Thursday said it will buy online information portal About.com for $410 million from publisher Primedia Inc. as it looks for new ways to build advertising revenue online.

There will no doubt be much talk and analysis of the buy as the NYT have been struggling with their online business model for some time, as i come across good stuff, i'll post it.

...and i didn't have to look too far. IMO the content commentary doesn't get much better than that found at Paid Content, here's what Rafat had to say:

Make no mistake, it is about search/CPC ad revenues in the short term, first and foremost. Then, of course, the benefits of added traffic over long term.
It will be very interesting to see how they execute on the integration of NYTimes.com and About.com. The phrase "adding an alternate model of content creation and aggregation" is a peculiar way to put it, but it denotes blogs and the whole blog media world, so to speak. In short, this is NYT's blog strategy, on the editorial side. Whether they want to characterize it as such, that I doubt...

There is much more, and it's goooood!