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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")."
...$200 billion going in, $12.5 billion going out...
What are you smoking?
Got a failed domain that still has a few hundred thousand people a day typing it in forgetting that you bit the dust long ago? Turn it into a porn site and get some cash out of those otherwise useless hits... I can't even count the number of gone-under sites that have pulled that stunt.
I only know the company only by their English web site - Lycos.com, having never spoken Spanish ever as far as I can remember.
Lycos was very important to the world.
They had:
1) A web search engine. Who else had a web search engine besides Yahoo and AltaVista?
2) A web hosting service. Who else had a web hosting service besides GeoCities and AngelFire?
3) An e-mail service. Who else had an e-mail service besides Yahoo and Hotmail?
4) Web games. Who else had web games besides Yahoo and MPlayer?
5) News stories. Wait, no they didn't. I know Yahoo had those.
All of the above was sarcastic.
As you can see, in all five important areas, Lycos was not in the top of each one. Sure, you knew they had each of those, but they weren't leaders at all in ANYTHING. Their idea seemed to be to JUST EXIST and the millions of people on the Internet couldn't just all flock to Yahoo or AltaVista, right? There would always be room for Lycos, right? Even without R&D? A portion of the Internet would use Lycos regardless of competition, and as Internet use grows, Lycos would grow in popularity, right?
Uh, no. They thought, if there are 5 stores in a mall and they are one of them, passerbys, who were in the mall for one of the other stores, many of htem would still visit Lycos, right? Or at least look in. Makes a lot of sense.
However, the Internet is not like that. You could place a store next door to a competitor and steal his visitors. You can place a phonebook ad and steal your competitors visitors as their clients check the phonebook for your competitor's phone number but see your ad next to it. With the internet, an analogy is links connecting the dots. HOWEVER, the problem is, THERE ARE NO LINKS TO COMPETITORS. In other words, if you visit one guy's site, HE WILL NOT HAVE ANY LINKS POINTING TO HIS COMPETITOR'S SITE. Furthermore, all links will be designed to keep you INSIDE HIS OWN SITE. Therefore, actually LIMITING your awareness of other sites.
So, Lycos thought (apparently by their lack of R & D) that they would just advertise and exist and as people flock to Yahoo and Google, they would get a share. Uh.. NO?
The one major remaining portal is Yahoo. They are still leaders in e-mail, games, bought GeoCities, searching, and they had news on their site as long as I can remember. All of Yahoo!'s competitors just 'existed'. Just like hundreds of businesses 'exist' but nobody cares about them. Yahoo made you involved in their life. Yahoo is still kicking, having bought Overture, GeoCities, WebRing, Inktomi, HotJobs: God knows what else.
Even now, with Google doing what they do, Yahoo! is still the overall winner and success story.
Cover your eyes and click this link!
This won't exactly count as a pure-domain transaction because there's actually some remnants of a company attached to the domain name.
That means Tripod might not be around anymore. WTF are the phishers supposed to use now?
Xoom got shut down when General Electric gave up on their failed NBCi project. Angelfire is also a part of Lycos so they'll likely get the same fate as Tripod.
And then there was one... GeoCities is the last of the "free web hosting" companies left standing as an offshoot of Yahoo!.
For any Canadians out there, the only way I can figure out to view the lycos.com page is through the Google cache. It seems that you get redirected to lycos.ca otherwise.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
No. Terra Networks wants to sell its entire Lycos, Inc. subsidiary for approximately $200 million -- not just the domain name.
Lycos, Inc. includes: Angelfire, HTML Gear, Lycos Mail, Matchmaker, Quote.com, Raging Bull, Sonique, Tripod, Webmonkey/Hotwired, and Wired News. It also has partnerships to create several co-branded Web sites. So, there are very valuable assets here.
My prediction: Ask Jeeves is likely thinking very heavily about acquiring Lycos to expand its distribution further. (It recently acquired Interactive Search Holdings for $343 million in cash and stock. ISH assets include Excite, iWon, My Search, and My Way, to name a few.) The more distribution Ask Jeeves has, the more money it can demand from Google -- which accounts for 70% of Ask Jeeves revenue. It currently takes 80 cents on the dollar, with Google taking 20 cents. With the purchase of ISH, Jeeves can probably demand 85. With Lycos too, it could quite easily get 90 cents. So, financially and strategically, Lycos would make sense for Jeeves.
Other possible candidates who might be interested in Lycos include InfoSpace, Primedia subsidiary About, Inc., or possibly even Google itself.
Lycos won't die -- it'll just change hands and be restructured. I guarantee it.
Cheers,
Doug
Doug Mehus http://doug.mehus.info/
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.
It's $12.5 billion going in, $200 million going out. Which means they've wasted more than 59/60th of the value.
As an aside: I don' think there ever was a $200 billion Dot-Com-Merger, was there? (How much was AOL-TimeWarner again?)
Jens
Lycos is the eighth largest web portal, with over three hundred subscribers. Their site features time and weather, email, search, an "About Us" page and a Terms of Service page.
Definitely a bargain at $200 million.
Maybe someone could turn it into a sort of "living museum" so future generations can experience an actual late 20th century web portal. Little footnotes* indicating areas of historical interest could be added.
*Like this one. Footnotes are used to convey additional information without interrupting the flow of the text.
Unknown host pong.
I do not know if only I feel this way about the look of the new Lycos website design, but do you not think it looks somewhat cheap and unprofessional, in the style of "search engines" which are in fact just advertisement whores appearing in various pastly infamous domains? The front page looks hideous as the preponderant yellow does not look nice at all. As for the links of 'top searches', it could be "helpful", but at the same time, what that section mostly does is clutter up my screen with links I mostly do not care about. The links to Lycos' other services are existant albeit the general layout and design makes the page look amateurish and cheap.
The search results page is not too bad, and the news search results page bearing the same design, then that aspect is alright in a sufficient way; but the image search results page definitly loses out to Google 's in my opinion -- the system warned me that the files I was about to view contain adult material, when in fact they didn't, and the search results' layout itself was idiotic. As for the shopping section, I believe Google's Froogle does a good stab at this section, and even more impressively so since it is more recent than Lycos'. I also forget to mention the ridiculous web hosting service, which is just truly unsatisfying in terms of space and service itself.
All in all, I think Lycos is just relying on its reputation now, just as MSN Search is relying on users utilizing Internet Explorer's search function. The problem is, it is already beaten by far by Yahoo! and probably Google will progressively transform into a web portal itself, albeit a much less cluttered one than the currently existing platforms. If you ask me, Lycos' death will not be anytime soon though, because there are still thousands of people relying on its services for now; still, it is just a matter of time I would say.
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
-cream pie
-zoo
-gagging
-scat
-hentai
-tentacle rape
All of these gave the following answer:
And searching for "bukkake" gave me this:
This is useless. It's not a porn search engine. It's more like John Ashcroft.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!