Yes that is correct. Lycos Europe has been for sale for a while now. You can have it for less than €200 million if you are quick. Just offer €150 million and I’m sure you will have a deal. Management plans to sell the company before the end of 2009. Yeah, that is what I would say too.
€200 million doesn’t sound like a lot for some premium internet screen estate until you realize that they lost €4,6 million in their third quarter. They have been bleeding money for years now and their revenue is shrinking too. In the first 9 months of last year they had revenues of €58,4 million against €46,9 million this year. With the current state of the economy and its likely effect on Ad spending there is little chance of growth there.
They published a financial statement 2 days ago with little information about how they are planning to get out of this slump, except selling what is left of it:
In the short term, the company will continue focusing on the product offensive to stabilize traffic. Supported by the launch of behavioral targeting, this should help attract advertising partners.
Lycos iQ has already exceeded the key threshold of one million queries. The shopping guide portal “decido” will be further promoted. Cost management will be further tightened in the fourth quarter of 2008 to offset decreasing revenues
Oh Lycos, you were once so big, inspiring and innovative. What happened?
They populated their help-desk with monkeys trained to be as little as helpful as they can possibly be, that’s what happened.
The things i had to do to get my domain name transferred from them still make me angry.
Not to mention their slow servers, although i must say that their admin panel looked really good and worked well.
Google happened :)…
Google was the doom for many other Lycoses like search engines:
- Altavista (the pioneer, now rest like a 80 years old on the porch looking at people as they pass by)…
- Hotbot (once was hot, now it’s dead cold)…
- Webcrawler (begging mercy from the big three)…
- Infospace (greedy people brought it down)…
- Yahoo is bleeding bad…
- Microsoft search tends to fall in anonymity…
And now Lycos is dragging its feet…like a death row inmate knowing that one day the axe will set him free from this world’s problems.
Yes, Google, the once underdog, doomed them…and from the ashes of the web war other companies arose to take their place, Google being the front runner now…
Will Google have the fate of Lycos in the future? Hard to anticipate…but yet we are living in a world surprises are everywhere.
Now fleck seems not such a bad deal for less then 200 times lycos price :)
However Lycos has a great system against phishing and scamming. They do their job as good as no other opponent company. Great guys!