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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.
You won't catch me that easily goatse boy
I'll just wait until they fail to renew the domain and just pay the 35 bucks.
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?
Horray! Its been 6 hours of reloading slashdot and finally we get a non-linux story.
Sure, Sun's Java Desktop System was insightful.
And Fedora Core 2 Test 3 was um, interesting.
The Linux Desktop Summit 2004 article was informative (wish I got some maple syrup and a t-shirt)
And the conspiricy theorys in the Turbolinux Licenses Windows Media 9 article were something to wrap my tinfoil hat around
But thank god, slashdot has returned to normal. A sexy search engine story to wet my apatite. Wait, is it how great Google is for running on Linux?! (/me reads TFA). Ok, were safe. Hopefully in a few hours a fud-filled gmail article will come up, or even better cmdrtaco will post this one again for double the pleasure, double the fun.
but seriously, about the maple syrup, hook me up.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
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").
While I'm familiar with many a washed-out pop musician turning to Playboy to boost an aching career, I'd never imagine this trend to extend to websites...
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.
Here's a quick field guide to some of the other pre-Google search engines...
AltaVista: Since it was born as Digital Equipment Corp.'s reasearch project rather than an attempt to make money, Compaq didn't exactly know what they had aquired. AltaVista suffered from an outdated ranking system and stale crawl data as it got passed from investment group to investment group. They ended up as a small fish in the Yahoo food chain at the end.
Excite: After merging with original cable-modem ISP @home, it all went down hill. An unprofitable website merged with a cable modem ISP who hadn't quite yet figured out that throtling user's bandwidth is a requirement to stay alive. In the end, they ended up selling a service for a price than less than it cost... and into the dot-bomb recycle bin they went. The Excite.com site is still up, but it's really just a less ad-intrusive version of iWon, and shares a lot in common with MyWay.com who is also from the same people. iWon, is of course known as a spreader of semi-spyware.
Inktomi/"HotBot": Inktomi got bought up by Yahoo!, and now powers the web results once again after being deposed by Google for a time.
HotBot.com was always just a licensee of Inktomi's data. It started as a spinoff to Wired Magazine, and ended up getting included in the sale of Wired News to Lycos. It's still ticking now as a unified interface for three of the web crawlers left standing... Inktomi, Google, and Ask Jeeves. They most likely will be part of this spinoff of what's left of Lycos.
Infoseek: Infoseek sold out at the height of the market to the mouse ears. Disney had the bright idea of uniting all of their web content under the Go.com brand, which also would allow all of the Disney-owned sites to share Go.com cookies so that a registered user's cookie from abc.go.com could also be read by espn.go.com. Infoseek would become the search engine portal that'd power the www.go.com portal at the center of the Go Network. A few years later, Disney realized their mistake. Nobody cared about the search engine portal... so they gutted the Go Network brand and turned www.go.com into nothing but a bare-bones portal with a Google-powered search. Inktomi as a search engine is no more. However, they did keep go.com domain in use in order to keep that cookie-sharing going.
GoTo.com: They were never really a search engine, they just licensed Inktomi's results. However, they invented the pay-per-click-search-placement model years before Google came on the scene. When Disney launched the Go Network, they sued saying that the Disney logo and branding was too close to their own, and won forcing the Go Network to change its logo. Shortly after that, they changed their name to Overture and got out of the direct search portal business. They've since been snapped up by Yahoo. Overture technically owns AltaVista just to show where they are in the pecking order over there.
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.
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/
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.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
In other news this evening, the Lycos dog was killed when someone typed in the words "1986 Chevrolet Caprice Front Bumper" into the search field and hit the "Go Get It" button. Services will be held at the fire hydrant outside of Arlington National Cemetary at noon.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05