Lycos Sold To South Korean Company

maggeth writes "Terra Networks has finally decided to dump its struggling web portal, Lycos, to the South Korean-based Daum Communications Corp. Terra bought Lycos for $12.5 billion and they managed to sell if for $105 million. More details at the story on eWeek."

Comments

Now you know why the bubble burst

[bigberk]

If someone actually thought that Lycos was worth $12.5 billion, you have a pretty good idea how messed up people were in the 90s, and why the bubble burst. A bunch of 'companies' creating no products, acting as nothing more than advertising and marketing information hubs, fooled millions of investors. Bravo, you sirs were truly kings.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[weiyuent]

If someone actually thought that Lycos was worth $12.5 billion, you have a pretty good idea how messed up people were in the 90s, and why the bubble burst.

Thing is though, everything else was massively inflated too. Terra Networks bought Lycos in 2000, in an all stock deal. So really, the $12.5 billion is just paper value. Who knows how much hard cash was actually burned -- not insubstantial but certainly much less than $12 billion.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[saden1]

What is Google really worth? And will it be worth what it is worth today 5 years from now. Wall Street should be called Speculation Street. You win some, you lose some. Google is flying high now but no one can guarantee it will continue to.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[Anonymous Coward]

The article doesn't go into details, but I highly doubt that $12.5B of real money was involved. I would imagine that the deal was done with the dot.com version of Monopoly(tm) money, swapping inflated stock. The stock transferred by the companies might have had an astronomical "market value", but if they had actually tried to sell the stock on the open market to convert it to cash, the value would have nosedived. All of this "market value" would have been generated by a handful of fools buying a tiny fraction of the total stock at outrageous prices; the $billions may never have existed in any real form.

Thus, the main value of such stock is to trade for other equally inflated stock, just like the main value of a $500 Monopoly bill is for buying little fake plastic hotels.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[timeOday]

Wall Street should be called Speculation Street. You win some, you lose some.

So what's the take home lesson here? Don't buy stock that will go down? Why didn't I think of that.

It's easy to say "don't take a risk, just keep slaving away in your cube for that guaranteed $55K/year," especially after a company crashes and burns. But to escape the treadmill you must place your bets at some point. So how do you do that shrewdly? If you wait until it's a "sure thing," it's surely too late.

Re:Now you know why the bubble burst

[Deviate_X]

Google is a very innovative and interesting company. But as soon as Terra purchased Lycos they got rid of most of the interesting and an innovative people. The point is that at time of merger Lycos was could have been successful if the new owners had had the right kind of imagination. As an example the original team for Sonique vanished after the merger...

Terra is that strong?

[usefool]

I must say if a company can lose more than $10 billion and still alive and kicking, it's actually not doing too badly.

sad but inevitable

[ximor_iksivich]

Lycos was a good portal before. Over the years the service has gone pretty bad. Sad to see them go but it had to happen. I am just wondering if the personal websites will be taken off? I have one. I really don't want to back it up :( On other hand, the article doesn't say anything about lycos.co.uk and related sites. Will this affect them as well?

This is proof of Wall Street's 'casino mentality'

[iamcf13]

How much is a company really worth when all the BS is stripped away?...

Re:how long has it been?

[robogun]

Over the last 10 years, I used webcrawler > altavista > dogpile and metacrawler > hotbot & other inktomi-based engines > google

Having run a website most of that time, it always puzzled me why people would usually come in thru yahoo. Before 2000 it was something like 80 %. Sure I had a listing, but half the links in their static directory were dead or mutated since the original listing in Yahoo. The same problems plague dmoz, etc. Who would use that.

Google's on the way out -- it's become a monoculture and therefore marketers focus on it. It's already useless for searching on pop culture things like actors or singers, or movies. The first 10,000 hits, (after the imdb page that google manually bumps to the top) are for dvd's cd's or posters, all affiliates, all alike, all selling the same exact disc or poster. At some point, there will officially be more stores than customers. Other search engines like alltheweb.com are better on those spam ridden searches.

Re:I should have been a stock broker...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Guinness in a bottle? Heresy. If you're not drinking a Perfect Pint, you're not drinking Guinness.

Re:So is this method not working?

[nomadic]

Considering someone sold it for 12 billion, I can assure you that somewhere a very nice profit was made.

Re:I should have been a stock broker...

[Idarubicin]

... 925 million 12-packs of bottled Guinness Draught... $555 million.

Half a billion dollars, and two beers for every man, woman, and child on earth...and instead they bought Lycos?

Dumbasses.