About.com Names President of International, Advertising Sales

Internet guide network About.com Inc. named Alan Wragg as president of About.com International and Jon Spaet as president of advertising sales.

Wragg has been with About.com since the service launched as the Mining Company in 1997. Spaet joins About.com from MSNBC.

As president of About.com International, Wragg will be responsible for managing the company’s international expansion and driving both revenue opportunities and relationships in the international arena.

Wragg founded the About.com ad sales division two years ago and is a veteran of both the publishing and cable industries. From September, 1987 to August 1996, he served as the publisher of TVSM Inc. (now owned by News Corp.). He also spent 14 years at Time Inc. serving as advertising director at LIFE Monthly and as a sales executive at Sports Illustrated.

Spaet will oversee the entire ad sales team, which currently has 28 employees with offices in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Most recently, he was vice president of advertising sales for MSNBC, a joint venture of General Electric’s NBC unit and Microsoft. Spaet was responsible for establishing and building the ad sales revenue stream for MSNBC cable since its inception.

About.com provides a network of 18 channels and more than 650 topic-specific sites led by expert human guides.