About.com Launches Luna Network to Better Serve Advertisers

About.com, a collection of vertical sites created by “guides,” on Thursday unveiled an effort, the Luna Network, aimed at dramatically increasing impressions available to advertisers.

The network matches About.com’s (BOUT) niche sites with other sites that offer related content, so the company an sell impressions across the categories. The partner sites, all of which must have more than 100,000 impressions, give up their page views and some real estate at the top of their pages. In return, they get a $7.50 CPM. About.com will charge between $60 to $120 CPM rate.

About.com execs expect the new relationship to bring in traffic that adds up to more than the sum of its parts, because the partner sites and About.com will be able to drive traffic back and forth to one another.

“If someone goes to a conventional ad network, whether it’s 24/7 or Flycast, those networks don’t own any sites, so they can’t throw traffic from one to another, and we can,” said Scott Kurnit, chairman and chief executive officer of About.com.

“What we have is a content network with site ownership that has obviously better verticals, high quality content, that’s more saleable.”

The move is likely to propel About.com, which is currently the tenth most visited Web property according to Media Metrix, even higher on the list. Although the company has always had a collection of very targeted vertical sites, it has never had that many impressions in each category. This initiative is an attempt to address the problem — to have both quality and quantity.

About.com will start by rounding up sites in the business, health, e-commerce, and computing categories. Next will come entertainment. The company says it’s already signed up 100 partner sites, which include StockCharts.com and AtDiabetes.com.