IAC announced that it would acquire About.com instead for US$300 million in cash. A source for TechCrunch later confirmed that Answers.com's offer was reportedly valued at US$270 million, but consisted of debt and equity in Answers.com. In the corresponding press release, IAC explained that the acquisition would help bolster and accompany its existing properties, such as the Ask.com web search engine. Jean fulfilled her role as chief executive during the transition period, while ownership was transferred to IAC, and then left About shortly after the sale was finalized. At the time of the IAC acquisition, which was signed on August 26, 2012, About.com consisted of nearly 1,000 topic sites and over three million unique articles, while, in traffic terms, Alexa ranked the site as number 37 in the U.S. and 80 in the global context. On April 2, 2013, Neil Vogel became the new CEO of About.com. Up until March 2003, Vogel was a key executive member of the marketing and media company Alloy Inc., a role that he left to cofound the Recognition Media marketing business that is responsible for producing the annual Webby Award event, as well as the Internet Week NY and Europe events. Vogel was selected by Business Insider for its 2012 "The Coolest People In New York Tech This Year" list, for his work as a venture partner of FirstMark Capital. , About.com was receiving about 84 million unique monthly visitors. Following his appointment, Vogel's overall plan for About focused on social, mobile, and user experience, with an emphasis on increasing the amount of time that users remain on the site, rather than attracting people in the first instance. Vogel also stressed the importance of monetization in his numerous post-appointment interviews and he included a summary of About's revenue model as part of his discussion of the future with Bloomberg: [We make money] one way, in general: we're advertising-supported. And that's monetized two ways: we do a lot of display advertising, and we do a lot of people clicking on links that we get paid for from Google and from others ... If we have all this traffic, and we have all this content, if we can make people engage content more, and spend more time here [About.com], and do more things, we're going to have more page views and much more of an opportunity to monetize About. Vogel further explained that IAC has been