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For Sale: Lycos.com
prostoalex writes "Terra Lycos is planning to sell Lycos.com. The price, quoted by News.com.com.com, is in the $200 mln range, while the original acquisition amounted to $12.5 bln. Lycos is currently re-inventing itself as a portal for the new generation with the link to Playboy affiliate placed right on the front page (click on "Adults 18+ only")."
Terra's aquisition of Lycos was an exercise in stupdity. See, Terra's a pretty big company with plenty of successful Spanish-language sites... but there's absoultely no synergy to be found in merging a group of English-langauge sites with Spanish-language sites. You can't share content accross the langages unless you have a ton of people doing translations.
One of the original webcrawling search engines ended up getting bought up by somebody who didn't know what to do with it. So, it got shuffled asside into a "network" of poorly defined brand, and faded into obscurity. Lycos as a search engine is now worthless. Maybe there's some value left in the brand name for somebody who wants to do a relaunch, but this dog has been relauched so many times I don't think you can teach it any new tricks anymore.
The market scorecard shows it exactly... $200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out. They misplaced 15/16th of the value that they started with.
And on top of that, I can't even hit the back button (just keeps you on the front page) in firefox .8
Is this really the right direction?
I'll just wait until they fail to renew the domain and just pay the 35 bucks.
Who's stupid enough to pay $35 a year to register a domain anymore?
I read once that business.com got the largest amount of money for being sold at something like eight million US dollars. If lycos.com came anywhere close to the 200,000,000 mark, that would be some kind of crazy record.
My bet is that Microsoft will buy it. They have to do something with all that cash, and they want a search engine and more (redirected) traffic for MSN, which they are having trouble growing. If you cannot earn eyeballs, buy 'em.
Table-ized A.I.
They've obviously realized like so many others that porn is the real gold mine of the internet.
I hope this is not the end of http://models.lycos.com/
I find this analogy quite interesting. It's similar in a way to one of the interesting things that General Motors apparently does, which I hadn't realised until someone pointed it out to me. Presumably it works for General Motors, though.
The theory is that if there are five brands of car on the market, then people who are shopping for a new car will pick one of those five, based on which one they prefer out of the available choices. If there are fifteen brands of car on the market, people will do the same. They have more choice, of course.
On the other hand, if ten of those brands happen to be owned by General Motors, then the chances are much higher that someone will choose a General Motors brand. It might not be completely even -- they might only get half of the custom instead of two thirds of it -- but the illusion of extra choice will prevent people from realising that a lot of those options are actually very similar to each other.
It's not entirely comparable, but the strategy seems to imply that sometimes just being there may be enough to get a significant amount of attention. As long as you're good enough to be considered. (That said, I agree that it clearly didn't work for Lycos.)
but there's absoultely no synergy to be found in merging a group of English-langauge sites with Spanish-language sites. You can't share content accross the langages unless you have a ton of people doing translations.
You must not live anywhere in the southern half of the US where everything is in both English and Spanish.
Speak English or Die!
from lycos.com. All I get is junk advertising services etc.
Sigh what a sad world - the only that's known to make money is pr0n....
Absolutely.
I can't even recall half of them anymore. There's just too many. It seems that there's more porn online now than anything else, let alone "ever before". Between p2p, broadband, and all the other 'traditional' means for aquiring the stuff, it's everywhere.
Now, being someone that isn't a terribly big fan of the stuff (it's goofy), and being a fairly big fan of the material that was there beforehand (educational, interesting things, largely), I'm a bit disappointed. All the good stuff is getting crouded out by stuff that is decidedly lower brow. There just doesn't seen to be much of the "free culture" left from what the Internet was originally. Sure, there's a slew of IT-related stuff - slashdot, sf.net, freshmeat, tldp, et al - but what about traditional sciences? They're getting crouded out.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm the least prudish of anyone I know, my first graduate paycheck may well be spent on a terabyte SCSI array for my porn collection.
However, 2 links from the lycos home-page are naked boobs, and 3 links away are 5meg hardcore porn clips. I think this is a bit much. If I want to see "Hot Moms" getting banged I'm quite capable of finding them myself using Google. This involves an active step on my part.
Is it just me, or is this a bad thing?