The New York Times today purchased About.com for $410 million in cash as reported by one of our terrific reporters at JupiterWeb. This follows Dow Jones' purchase a few weeks ago of financial site Marketwatch.com.

Another recent deal was the sale of Slate.com to the Washington Post. The common denominator here is traditional media companies purchasing pure online media properties. Think back to the mid-1990s. It would have been hard to believe then that old line organizations such as The Washington Post, The New York Times and Dow Jones would be making purchases of Web sites.

Newspapers have been losing ad share to the Internet and this trend is sure to continue. Therefore I am sure you will see that these three organizations as well other newspaper companies will continue to be big buyers of Web sites that have traffic allied with either their newspapers or other print media.