Terra sells Lycos at Yard sale price Options

[cre8pc]

Story:

Terra Sells Lycos

Bought for $12.5 billion in 2000, Lycos is a steal today at a mere $170 million.

That's right – TerraLycos will again just be Terra, as it has reached an agreement to sell Lycos to an as yet unnamed Korean company.

[Black_Knight]

It is still over-priced at $170 million. I honestly think that's about double what it is worth even to someone brilliant enough to turn the company around. It has lost almost 99% of its value in just 4 years, (Its current value is just over 1 percent of its sale price in 2000), which is one hell of an indictment. To stop it continuing on that trend, and being worth just $2 million in another 4 years time is going to take a lot of work, and will probably involve replacing a large proportion of the existing staff, practices and even technology. In other words, the only thing of any real value is probably the name itself, and $170 million for a domain name is just ridiculous.

[Brad]

I think the new owners will have to shake up the managment and staff, as you say, lest Lycos fall right back into drifting like a rudderless ship.

Most of all they need to come up with a real plan for what they want to be. There is the nucleus of a portal but it has been run into the ground, but it could be rebuilt. I'm not sure about all this social networking stuff which has fad stamped all over it.

Lycos needs to be a destination or find a niche.

I wonder what they will do with Hotbot and the whole search part of it?

[trevHCS]

Didn't Terra get rid of Webmonkey by firing all the staff not long back?

What is it with these companies who buy up other companies for stupid amounts of money which their never going to be able to get back within any reasonable timescale and then drop them off a few years later when it all went a bit wrong....and the management still keep their jobs.

I'd imagine Lycos could cost a lot more to keep running than just shutting it down if you imagine the bandwidth being used by that site. Then again, if we grouped together and bought the domain for $300 and put Adsense on the page, Cre8asite wouldn't have to worry about money again...

Trev

[Adrian]

Makes me find it even more amusing when someone phoned up trying to convince us that paying £700 for an annual banner placement on a single set of SERP results was worthwhile. Despite not being able to provide any info such as the number of people even typing that search. All the figures they had were the number of general visitors to Lycos in the last year or something.

As we already had a number 2 listing in the organic results for said term, I declined the offer..... after wasting a good bit of his time and asking lots of questions he couldn't answer

He was insitant there was going to be a big general advertising campaign for Lycos coming up soon. Preumably that advertising was for a new owner......

[ac]

The funny thing about being an also type of search engine is the fact that a two person operation with a better idea can gain more market share than some engines that have been around for a while.

This new entry www.blinkx.com has got more attention in the last month than the Lycos engine got in the last 2 years.

Some of the new engines are going about things a bit different, Blinkx is offering a browserless search interface, hard drive, news and email search all in one package.

So it is not a surprise to see some of these worn out search engines fall off of the face of the earth since they offer little innovation to the marketplace.

:mad: :shock: :mad:

[Ransak]

In other words, the only thing of any real value is probably the name itself, and $170 million for a domain name is just ridiculous.

I doubt the owners used their own money. Goes to show you some people are real good at rounding up capital. Reminds me of things that went on in the late 90's with people just throwing capital around at anything with .com in it's name.

Frank Vollono