From Jim Metrock: I spent a good portion of yesterday surfing around a web site called About.com. This is the company that Channel One’s parent company, Primedia, Inc., wants to merge with. The press release below explains our concerns about this merger. I just wanted to add some thoughts after treading through the gutter for several hours.
First, About.com is most definitely in the pornography business. Let me be even more concrete. About.com is in the hardcore pornography business. I spent hours yesterday printing out About.com content and links for my files. (You never know when they will take something off the web and say "I don’t know what you are talking about." Let’s hope they remove it and then apologize.)
The content that I printed from About.com would make you weep. What was About.com management thinking about when they decided to put this filth on their site? Don’t these people have daughters or sons? About.com has links to teen sex sites. I have it all documented. It is just as shameful for Primedia to want any revenue that flows from Internet porn.
We still don’t know what percentage of About.com’s revenue is derived from hardcore porn. That figure will be important. If it is a significant amount, then Primedia may indeed have bought About for its porn revenue and they won’t try to remove it. If it is a small amount of the total revenue, then I would expect Primedia to demand that About remove it before the merger.
If I need to get more specific, I will, within the range of good taste. This is rough stuff. If Primedia gets into hardcore, or even softcore, Internet pornography then I can guarantee many school boards will look twice at having Channel One in their schools. Channel One is bad enough, but if their parent company is a "player" in Internet porn, well, let’s say it won’t help Paul Folkemer in his efforts to keep kids watching the Channel One commercials.
