FOR SALE: Lycos Europe (only €200.000.000)
Written on 30th October 2008
7 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
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?
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[...] than a month ago we told you that Lycos was for sale for only €200 million. Apparently our little ad didn’t help much because Lycos hasn’t found a buyer and [...]
[...] than a month ago we told you that Lycos was for sale for only €200 million. Apparently our little ad didn’t help much because Lycos hasn’t found a buyer and [...]
[...] than a month ago we told you that Lycos was for sale for only €200 million. Apparently our little ad didn’t help much because Lycos hasn’t found a buyer and [...]