The New York Times Company tried. They failed. Now, media group IAC plans on taking a crack at making About.com a profitable company. The source for user-generated guides was hit hard by the Google Panda Update in February, 2011. The “low quality bulk content” algorithm change in the search giant sent About.com and sites like it plummeting in the search rankings, their primary playing arena and the source of the majority of their traffic. The ads served on pages found in search generated a lot of revenue, but Panda changed things for the company. According to Techcrunch: Alexa ranks About.com…

Millions of websites have had to go through hell and back to survive long enough to reach profitability, but there is an elite list of websites that have managed to survive and prosper through the past decade and beyond. The things they went through dwarf any issues that their more recent counterparts have had to face. It wasn’t easy by any means for these sites though. From the dot-com bubble to the economic recession, the web has, at times, been plagued with turmoil that would make most website owners pack up shop. But, by luck or by design, the following have managed to keep their business going…