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Lycos Sold To South Korean Company

Posted by timothy on from the profit-and-loss dept.

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."

57 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Worth it? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Man, the dot com boom was something eh. $12 billion? And now they sold it at $105 million, I wonder how much they lost.

    1. Re:Worth it? by TeraCo · · Score: 4, Funny

      Well.. my guess is 11.895 billion.

      --
      Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
    2. Re:Worth it? by jebiester · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, it would be more than that - since they seem to have been running at a loss for a while. According to their report they did become profitable late last year though. Maybe revise that estimate to over 11.9 billion.

      There's a finacial report here.

  2. Korea? Great. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Guess you'll have to log in as user "test" or "guest"

  3. So is this method not working? by chill · · Score: 2, Funny

    1. Make oodles of faux cash in the Internet Bubble
    2. Blow an obscene amount buying an overhyped buzzword (portal)
    3. ??
    4. Profit! Not!

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    1. Re:So is this method not working? by nomadic · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  4. Now you know why the bubble burst by bigberk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by weiyuent · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by saden1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --

      -----
      One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
    3. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

    4. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by killjoe · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Let's all guess at what will happen to the CEO of a company that bought a company for 12.5 billion and sold it for 105 million.

      a) He will be fired immediately and will lose all of his "golden parachute" benefits.
      b) He will be demoted and will get a cut in pay.
      c) He will be administratively punished perhaps by receiving a bad review from his board. It will go on his permanment record.
      d) He will receive a bonus worth tens of millions of dollars, he will remain a CEO for a little while longer then he will quit and move on to another company where he will do it again.

      --
      evil is as evil does
    5. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful
      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.

    6. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by Technician · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Some investors were thinking Lyco was the beginning of Google as a portal. Unfortunately for Lycos, they aimed for advertisers dollars instead of providing consumer satisafaction. They lost the consumers as Google showed them how it's done. Even while Google was growing and passing Yahoo and AOL, Lycos didn't get a clue and thought more and bigger ads = more revenue. They missed the important step of obtaining market share. Oops!

      On another note, I wonder if MS is going to be too overloaded and advertisement heavy in their new search engine. Are they going to take a page from Google? Are they going to try to embrace and extend IE to lock in users to the MS search? Will such a miss-step drive more users to vendor agnostic browsers other than IE?

      It'll be fun to watch the MS attempt. Somehow I see it being driven by the same playbook as the X-box. A big money sink the first few years to get it linked into everything and then the advertising and paid content kicks in (tied to MS version of i-Tunes for example).

      I see the web being diveded into the MS stuff and the rest of the WWW much like AOL and the Internet. MS will index partners and Google will index the rest of the web including all the good indie, OSS, and counter-culture stuff.

      Win 98 lite will probably not show up in a MS search for windows speed enhancements.

      --
      The truth shall set you free!
    7. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by metalhed77 · · Score: 3, Informative

      IIRC Terra also paid 60 million for the now extremely defunct sonique media player. Yes, 60 million for a skinnable MP3 player.

      --
      Photos.
    8. Re:Now you know why the bubble burst by Deviate_X · · Score: 2, Insightful


      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...

  5. What a Bargain by wayward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I just took a look at the Lycos website. Loud ads AND search functionality for a mere $105 million? What a steal!

  6. So... by lingqi · · Score: 4, Informative

    Lycos owns Wired and Webmonkey and a slew of other actually really cool stuff right...
    I even vaguely remember monster.com being part of their network.

    Lycos portal I don't care, what happens to these?

    --

    My life in the land of the rising sun.

    1. Re:So... by jasonla · · Score: 2, Informative

      Wired carried a much more detailed story about the purchase.

      http://wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64431,00.htm l?tw=wn_tophead_9

      Will be be seeing wired in Korean next? Christ NNNNNOOOOOOOO!

    2. Re:So... by bobetov · · Score: 2, Interesting

      As an employee of Monster.com, I can tell you that ain't so. Monster is a huge company, with things like the largest yellow-pages directory service, military personnel support svcs, you name it. Even my little branch of Tickle.com. :-)

      --
      Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
    3. Re:So... by jasonla · · Score: 3, Informative

      I have received two replies from Wired News staffers, regarding my email. They confirm that Wired News, as part of Lycos, was sold to Daum.

      No one, including the staff, knows what will happen to Wired News as it is too early to tell, both staffers said. One staffer said there had been talks of splitting Lycos's various entities and selling them individually, but the idea was dropped.

      The staffer also pointed out an interesting difference between the Wired News website and Wired printed magazine. The magazine is owned by Conde Nast and is not part of Wired News. Lycos owns the website and publishes articles from the magazine through a deal the two forged a few years ago.

  7. ripped off! by weighn · · Score: 2, Interesting
    maybe there are other assets not mentioned in this story, but $105 mill for a slice of Lycos?!

    Speaking of ripped off, why does the design of Daum's logo look strangely familiar?

    --
    Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
    1. Re:ripped off! by lothar97 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Take a look in the URL for the image, and you'll see how Google does their ranking. They don't analyze the picture, they do keywords. For example, the URL for the stuffed bear is "rooth.org/check/ ebay/logo.jpg"

      --

    2. Re:ripped off! by super+awesome · · Score: 2, Informative

      it does look familiar. I think the Daum logo looks better. Maybe for a +1 Interesting, the pronunciation of Daum is Dah-eum. Not damn or dayam.

      --

      m y k a r m a i s m o r e p o s i t i v e t h a n y o u r s.
  8. Nothing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    They weren't sold

  9. It's okay by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Slashdot 503's will probably be fixed someday, and then you'll feel better.

  10. New variant of an old joke. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    How do you make a small fortune out of the dot com boom?

    Start with a large one.

    1. Re:New variant of an old joke. by vidarh · · Score: 2, Interesting

      A quote often attributed to Richard Branson is perhaps the best known variation. I don't know if it's true, but supposedly he was once asked how to become a millionaire and replied something along the lines of "begin as a billionaire and start an airline". Given the amounts he lost on Virgin Atlantic in the beginning it's a fairly plausible quote...

  11. RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Lycos owns Wired and Webmonkey and a slew of other actually really cool stuff right...
    I even vaguely remember monster.com being part of their network.

    Lycos portal I don't care, what happens to these?

    Read the fine article.

  12. Terra is that strong? by usefool · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
    1. Re:Terra is that strong? by lothar97 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I imagine most of the "loss" was in intangible assets, such as brandnames, goodwill, etc. To buy Lycos, Inc., Terra just printed $12.5 billion in stock certificates (see this article), which made the then stockholders of Lycos (valued in 2000 at $70ish per share) significantly happy. Terra is owned by Telifonica, which is the national phone company of Spain.

      --

  13. I should have been a stock broker... by isd_glory · · Score: 5, Funny

    Hm... $12.5 billion can buy about 925 million 12-packs of bottled Guinness Draught. At the 5 cent per bottle recycling rate in NY state, that would net about $555 million.

    The moral of the story: beer is always a safer investment than struggling dotcoms.

    1. Re:I should have been a stock broker... by wiresquire · · Score: 2, Funny

      925 million 12 packs of beer on the wall
      925 million 12 packs of beer
      take one down
      pass it around
      924 million 9 hundred and 99 thous...

      err, fuck it and pass me a beer.

      --

      So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?

    2. Re:I should have been a stock broker... by syousef · · Score: 3, Funny

      Hm... $12.5 billion can buy about 925 million 12-packs of bottled Guinness Draught. At the 5 cent per bottle recycling rate in NY state, that would net about $555 million.

      Free as in beer? *smirk* I like that thinking. Can we submit this as proof that you can make money out of a free as in beer software business?

      And of course the only problem is disposing of the beer....buddy, friend, pal.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    3. Re:I should have been a stock broker... by Lost+Dragon · · Score: 2, Funny

      Even smarter would be to go to Michigan where they give you 10 cents per bottle, and you could effectively double that.

      No, no! Don't try it man! And especially not with a postal truck....

    4. Re:I should have been a stock broker... by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2, Insightful

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

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    5. Re:I should have been a stock broker... by Idarubicin · · Score: 2, Insightful
      ... 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.

      --
      ~Idarubicin
  14. Gone downhill by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Lycos has really gone downhill apparently. They actually have the audacity to feature a "model search" (read: PORN) on their front page.

    What a world we live in. What happened to the nice Lycos dog?

    1. Re:Gone downhill by Tablizer · · Score: 2, Informative
      And, um, here is the real story on the dog logo: http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/13471

      A Dog Day For New Lycos Campaign
      -- ClickZ News

      By Beth Cox | November 6, 1998

      Lycos Inc. which just launched a nationwide ad campaign featuring a Labrador retriever as a logo, was sued for trademark infringement by Labrador Software Inc.

      You guessed it, the software company wants the Internet search directory to halt its advertising campaign that features "Lycos," the expert-fetching retriever. ....
      --
      Table-ized A.I.
    2. Re:Gone downhill by Graelin · · Score: 3, Funny

      What a world we live in. What happened to the nice Lycos dog?

      Well, I don't have this first hand but they say he had a nasty run in with drugs... PHP maybe... He was known to burn his Lycos shares just to try the new designer drugs.. then came the booze... and the hookers.. One day, the cops found him face down in his own vomit on the sidewalk all coked up. They put him in the slammer for 20 to life where is is now known as Spot the Bead Freak. (Don't ask...)

      What a world indeed.

  15. sad but inevitable by ximor_iksivich · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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?

  16. Logout by deadmongrel · · Score: 2, Informative

    Clear the cookie and reload the page. The error mainly occurs when you log in.

  17. I sure hope they bought this domain too. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    rycos.com

    1. Re:I sure hope they bought this domain too. by Achoi77 · · Score: 4, Informative

      I know it's meant to be a joke, but Koreans can pronounce their L's fine. Actually, they can have more trouble pronouncing R's. Which means that Lycos would be preferred over Rycos. Don't confuse Japanese with Korean.

  18. Not too bad a deal by r_j_prahad · · Score: 4, Funny

    Terra bought Lycos for $12.5 billion and they managed to sell if for $105 million.

    Not so bad a deal that they can't make up for it in volume....

  19. I remember... by Cyno01 · · Score: 4, Funny

    Back in middle school, using lycos picture search for porn. Bout the only thing its ever been good for...

    --
    "Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
  20. This is proof of Wall Street's 'casino mentality' by iamcf13 · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  21. That aspirating sound and rustling bills... by Marko+DeBeeste · · Score: 2, Funny

    .... is simply modern Lycos-suction

    --
    Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
  22. The Investors Creed by Velcroman98 · · Score: 4, Funny

    It's supposed to be buy low sell high, did they forget?

    --
    Kevin
    Irrational Diversions
  23. My how times change by jlink7 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    When I was in High School (umm, awhile ago), Lycos was my favorite search engine, even over Yahoo!. I can't begin to imagine the management mishaps that had to have happened in order to drive that cart into the ground.

    I also thought that they had plenty of interesting features, they really just failed to innovate in order to compete against the Yahoo!'s, Googles, and MSNs of today.

    1. Re:My how times change by waimate · · Score: 3, Informative

      Take heart:- if, when you were in high school, you had a favorite search engine, then it is not too much of a while ago ;)

  24. Telefonica by jjga · · Score: 2, Informative
    Telifonica, which is the national phone company of Spain

    Telefonica stopped being a state-owned company several years ago. So it is not the "national" company anymore, or at least not more than any of the many more that currently exist in Spain.

  25. Wha? by gwoodrow · · Score: 2, Funny

    Lycos was still around?

  26. nope - this is a different CEO by muyuubyou · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Terra belongs to Telefónica (biggest telecom in Spain, coming from a national monopoly). In year 2000 the CEO was Villalonga (close friends with ex-PM Aznar) whose strategy was expanding through the Americas, thus buying Lycos made sense. Villalonga was expelled by political pressure, since in Spain, american practices like stock options are considered bribery and corruption.

    The new CEO (who has devalued the company substantially) had a completely different approach and Lycos no longer makes sense in the company.

  27. Re:how long has it been? by robogun · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  28. but Lycos is the best place in the Internet by rggoldie · · Score: 3, Funny
    It's hard to believe Lycos could fall so far when their "high octane site yields access to literally everything that makes the information age great." Lycos Culture
    Our Culture - What Do We Do? Lycos is the most exciting online service in existence. Combining elements of navigation, community and commerce, we forge speedily ahead in our goal to become the most visited online destination in the world. Lycos gains our followers the old fashioned way...we earn them. Our interactive products and an unmatched customer focus guarantee us a spot at the zenith of the World Wide Web. One quick browse through our high octane site yields access to literally everything that makes the information age great. Join Lycos and secure yourself a place in the future of the Internet.
  29. Evidently... by Chordonblue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They must know something we don't. I can tell you that every single Korean girl in our school has a Daum account - as amazing as that seems.

    Daum is also consistantly the most visited portal in S. Korea. They are now what Yahoo was 3 years ago. Hell, they even LOOK like Yahoo!

    So why would a top Korean site purchase Lycos? For SmartSearch perhaps? Dunno!

    --
    "...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
  30. Ummmmm, 2%? by tehdaemon · · Score: 3, Informative
    At that price, you would earn about 2%/year on your money. Not all that hot. The only way that this makes sense is if you think that Google will a) double (or better) its profits by cost cutting etc., or b) double (or better) it's revenue with the same profit margins, and you think that Google's market value will not fall. Or you think you can sell it back soon to an even bigger sucker than yourself before reality sets in.

    If not, well, 10 year Treasuries are yealding 4.5%, and you will get your money back. Given the risk factors, $5 billion sounds a little high to me. It almost looks to me like the bubble lost some air, but did not pop.

    --
    Laws are horrible moral guides, moral guides make even worse laws.