About.com launches The Spruce, a standalone site for Home Decor and Food

In its continued effort to divide and conquer, About.com is launching yet another standalone media brand in the form of The Spruce, a site dedicated to home improvement and food.

The new site brings over more than 50,000 pieces of content covering home decor/design, food and recipes, gardening, family life, crafts and hobbies, and pets. The idea here is to combine About’s ‘how-to’ expertise with a brand that fits the ‘browsiness’ of these topics.

“For our Finance and Health sites, we see people go very deep on something very narrow like 401ks or Diabetes,” said About.com CEO Neil Vogel. “With home and food, users are more likely to view a wide range of topics and browse the site in a less concentrated way. The Spruce aims to offer that structure with the best possible content.”

Given the type of content available on The Spruce, the company has created a video studio to pump out video content alongside high-traffic how-to articles, whether it’s how to make Creme Brulee or how to hang a shelf.

Giant Ice Cream Sandwich by The Spruce from About.com on Vimeo.

The Spruce will also include a recipe locker for folks to save their favorite meals and recipes on the site itself. This recipe locker also converts recipes into shopping lists so folks cooking at home can handle every step of the process with ease.

This is part of a broader move by About.com to build out separate brands for its content.

“People don’t want to learn about finance on the same website where they learned how to bake a pie,” said Vogel.

About.com’s troves of content aren’t properly highlighted or well-circulated as long as they exist as a small piece of the huge About.com umbrella brand.

It started with Verywell, a health site meant to take on WebMD, and moved into finance (with The Balance) and tech (with Lifewire).

While commerce doesn’t tie into the former two sites very seamlessly, Lifewire and The Spruce could create new revenue channels for About beyond advertising.