Last week the New York Times acquired the Internet site About.com from Primedia for more than $400 million. In recent months, Dow Jones acquired competitor MarketWatch.com for more than $500 million, and the Washington Post acquired the online magazine Slate.

Given the similarity of offering a news product blended with advertising, newspapers have understandably been looking at Internet companies and broadcast companies. Newspaper companies can lawfully acquire any Internet company in America subject only to antitrust review. In contrast, thanks to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, the same newspaper companies are irrationally prohibited from purchasing many broadcast assets.

The business logic of Dow Jones acquiring a close rival such as MarketWatch is easy to understand, and so too is the Post’s acquisition of Slate. In both instances, the acquiring party bought a successful firm whose operations would join instantly with the new parent company.

The purchase of About.com by the New York Times is a more intriguing story. With annual revenue of $40 million and much smaller earnings, About.com would seem of small interest to a company the size of the New York Times.

The New York Times is following an investment strategy that has worked for the past few decades: diversified investments in related fields. In the case of About.com, the diversification is both online and to an audience that is not typical of the Times. Perhaps most alarming to the intellectual cognoscenti of the New York Times, About.com likely has a wider following.

According to its Web site, more than 20 million people visit About.com each month. They don’t come for “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” They come instead for answers to practical problems, an online how-to-do-it reference guide. The challenge for the New York Times is translating these loyal visitors into substantially more than $40 million in annual revenue and meager earnings.

A quick look at About.com reminds a visitor more of the no-nonsense Readers Digest than the intellectual self-consciousness of the New York Times.

The Web site is financially underperforming. Does the New York Times brain trust have the business savvy to turn curious Internet readers at About.com into cash either through advertisements, subscriptions, or referral service.

The relative online success of either the New York Times and About.com is in the eye of the beholder. The site netcraft.com ranks frequently visited Web sites worldwide, but neither makes its top 100.

In contrast, Alexa.com, with a similar type of ranking, places About.com at no. 72 worldwide, and the nytimes.com at 89. Both Web sites are viewed by slightly less than 1% of all Internet users. In a world with hundreds of millions of Web sites, these are admirable ratings.

A few weeks ago, Lee Publications announced the acquisition of the venerable Pulitzer Company, with newspapers around the country. Lee paid $1.46 billion for Pulitzer for an easily valued asset: $440 million in predictable annual revenue, a stable cost structure, nearly $300 million in cash and marketable securities, as well as tangible assets around the country.

The New York Times is taking a different tack. It is investing $400 million in an Internet company with a proven track record and a large visitor base, but with an underdeveloped financial base.

It is a more circumspect investment than one in the rush of the dot.com explosion. The many failures discouraged all but the bravest investors during the nadir of the market in 2001-02. Investors, like the New York Times, are slowly returning.

The dot.com crash left a small but enviable survivor class of firms, those founded before 2001 and still profitably in business. This group has steadily been gaining strength. Publicly traded online companies such as Amazon, AIC, eBay, and Google have substantially greater enterprise values than three years ago. For privately held survivor companies, such as About.com, a similar pattern holds as well.

About.com was founded in 1997, the antediluvian era of the Internet. The New York Times must now guide About.com from the prehistoric to the contemporary world of marketing and advertising.

A former FCC commissioner, Mr. Furchtgott-Roth is president of Furchtgott-Roth Economic Enterprises. E-mail: hfr@furchtgott-roth.com.