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Businesses The Internet

Lycos Sold To South Korean Company 212

Posted by timothy 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."
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Lycos Sold To South Korean Company More

Lycos Sold To South Korean Company

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  • Worth it? (Score:2, Funny)

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

  • Korea? Great. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Guess you'll have to log in as user "test" or "guest"
  • 1. Make oodles of faux cash in the Internet Bubble
    2. Blow an obscene amount buying an overhyped buzzword (portal)
    3. ??
    4. Profit! Not!

  • Now you know why the bubble burst (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bigberk ( 547360 ) <bigberk@users.pc9.org> on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:23PM (#9866874)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by weiyuent ( 257436 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:57PM (#9866991) Journal
      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 (Score:4, Insightful)

      by saden1 ( 581102 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:04AM (#9867014)
      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.

      • Yes, but there's Speculation Street and then there's OMG!!!!! SPECULATION STREET!!!!!!!!

      • What is Google really worth? And will it be worth what it is worth today 5 years from now.

        Considering Google made $256 million on $1.6 billion in revenue [searchenginewatch.com] last year, I say they were worth a pretty penny. I don't know about the $20-30 billion numbers that are floating around, but I could see paying $12 billion for Google.

        • Ummmmm, 2%? (Score:4, Informative)

          by tehdaemon ( 753808 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @03:25AM (#9867538)
          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.

      • Re:Now you know why the bubble burst (Score:4, Insightful)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:34AM (#9867106)
        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.

        • I've been investing for a short time now and have done pretty well. I tend to stick with companies I know and have an understanding of their products. One thing I've had great luck with and have found to be highly recommended is buying when stock prices plummet for one reason or another. Take for example a couple weeks ago when Redhat announced they were restate their audited financial statements for 02-04. They really weren't changing anything but investors freaked nonetheless. RHAT stock dropped [yahoo.com] 25%
        • So what's the take home lesson here? Don't buy stock that will go down? Why didn't I think of that.

          The lesson is called "dollar cost averaging". Which means that you put the same dollar amount into a range of stocks/funds once per month or once per week. Sometimes you'll buy low and make out well, other times you'll buy high and not do so well. But over the long run it all averages out and you'll make decent returns.

          It also removes the emotional aspect from investing. No jumping on "hot" stocks bec

      • 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 [sonique.com] vanished after the merger...

    • Re:Now you know why the bubble burst (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:06AM (#9867026)
      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.

    • "Worth" is simply the amount people are willing to pay for something at a particular point in time. If someone paid, or offered to pay, $12.5 billion for Lycos at a particular point in time, then it was really worth that much to the person who made the offer. Unless, of course, he/she is irrational...but then, how many irrational people (or organizations) have that much money?
    • 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 qui

      • nope - this is a different CEO (Score:5, Interesting)

        by muyuubyou ( 621373 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @01:45AM (#9867276)
        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.
        • in Spain, american practices like stock options are considered bribery and corruption.

          Hmmm. I wonder why?
        • Villalonga was expelled by political pressure, since in Spain, american practices like stock options are considered bribery and corruption.

          Perhaps this is because Telefonica is not truly a private company in the US sense of the word. The national government has "golden shares" that give it controlling interest and the political group in power still appoints several board members. This practice of holding golden shares was declared illegal by a European Union court, but the practice remains in Spain. The

    • Re:Now you know why the bubble burst (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Technician ( 215283 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @02:04AM (#9867316)
      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.
      • Speaking as someone who as purchased targeted hits on both Overture (MS run) and google, Overture has a much better ROI. Google farms out hits to other search engines, who can make more money by paying people to click on google's links.

        Google is making money now, but it's vulnerable.
        • I know, There was a big write-up on bogus Google clicks, either to raise one's page rank, or to suck up a competitor's advertising budget. It has it's problems, but for the end user, it's useful, and for the advertiser, it's where the eyeballs are. Simply put, If you are looking for a bit of information such as a videogame hack or IC pinout, where is the first place you do a search? For most people, it's Google. Google can't become lazy. They can make the mistake of stagnation (like IBM did).
      • I'll argue that Google serves advertisers better than Lycos ever did, by having better targetting to audiences, easier to purchase small amounts of advertising, etc.

  • What a Bargain (Score:4, Funny)

    by wayward ( 770747 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:25PM (#9866878)
    I just took a look at the Lycos website. Loud ads AND search functionality for a mere $105 million? What a steal!

  • So... (Score:5, Informative)

    by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:25PM (#9866881) Journal
    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?

    • Nothing (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:27PM (#9866885)
      They weren't sold

    • RTFA (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

    • Before google came around, I used hotbot as my search engine. I remember at some point it switched to being http://www.hotbot.lycos.com. Now, it no longer switches you to hotbot.lycos.com, but both still work. Is this related?

    • Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)

      by jasonla ( 211640 )
      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 [wired.com]

      Will be be seeing wired in Korean next? Christ NNNNNOOOOOOOO!
      • Wait, I'm still confused, did the deal include wired.com? It doesn't seem to, but the top of the article at wired.com [wired.com] you link to has the lycos network crap at the top of it.

        I can't seem to find a straight answer

        • The Terra Lycos banner will appear on all Lycos Inc. sites until the transaction is complete, expected by September 2nd or 3rd at the latest.

          Yes, Daum will own both the Wired magazine and Wired News site. :)

          The sites Daum buys include (not going to bother to provide links as I'm too lazy to type all the extra code):

          Angelfire, Gamesville, HotBot, Hotwired (including Animation Express and Webmonkey), HTML Gear, Lycos.com, Lycos Zone, Matchmaker, Quote.com, Raging Bull, Sonique, Tripod, Who Where, Wired, an

      • Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)

        by jasonla ( 211640 )
        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 magazi

    • Re:So... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by bobetov ( 448774 )
      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. :-)

  • ripped off! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by weighn ( 578357 )
    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 [daum.net] logo look strangely familiar [google.com.au]?

    • Good point.

      Is there something wrong with Google that when you do a search for 'ebay logo' in their Image Search, you get a Harley Davidson logo at number 3 and a stuffed animal at number 5?

      • Re:ripped off! (Score:3, Informative)

        by lothar97 ( 768215 ) *
        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"

    • Re:ripped off! (Score:2, Informative)

      by super awesome ( 700604 )
      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.
    • oh yes....they use different colors and sized letters to make a logo.

      jesus christ....it's a worldwide economy, worldwide network....limited colors and designs....this color is mine has got to stop. Unless there is real room for confusion who gives a shit.

  • New variant of an old joke. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:34PM (#9866914)
    How do you make a small fortune out of the dot com boom?

    Start with a large one.

  • Terra is that strong? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by usefool ( 798755 ) on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:37PM (#9866923) Homepage
    I must say if a company can lose more than $10 billion and still alive and kicking, it's actually not doing too badly.

    • Re:Terra is that strong? (Score:5, Informative)

      by lothar97 ( 768215 ) * <owen@NOSPAm.smigelski.org> on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:03AM (#9867013) Homepage Journal
      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 [internetnews.com]), 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.

      • Telefonica (Score:2, Informative)

        by jjga ( 612356 )
        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.

    • Bill Gates lost $45 Billion, and he's still alive and kicking... paper profits/losses don't really count.

  • I should have been a stock broker... (Score:5, Funny)

    by isd_glory ( 787646 ) * on Monday August 02, 2004 @11:38PM (#9866933)
    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.

  • Gone downhill (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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?
    • Not only that, but the only place I have seen Lycos recently is in the crappy search bar/sidebar spyware they have floating around.

    • Re:Gone downhill (Score:4, Funny)

      by Graelin ( 309958 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @03:57AM (#9867619)
      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.
  • 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?
    • I am just wondering if the personal websites will be taken off? I have one. I really don't want to back it up

      You should have a backup anyway. Is it Lycos' answer to the (cringe) geocities?

  • I remember when hotbot showed up... I thought it was the greatest. The I switched to yahoo, and finally to google. I used inktomi somewhere in there. I have no clue what I was using before hotbot... It's important to note that Terra kept about 500 million USD in profitable assets after the sale... But $12 billion... wow.
    • 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
  • I wonder whats gonna happen to: Daum Lycos Tripod (the host with the Worlds Worst Perl / CGI Implementation) Daum Lycos Europe Daum Lycos Tripod UK/Daum Lycos UK (lycos.co.uk) - not a that bad host 50mb space, php, mysql Doesn't lycos europe have a connection to bertellesmann (or what ever their name is), the company that brought AOL to germany? Now they need to update the banner at the top of the sites to be: daum lycos network!

  • I sure hope they bought this domain too. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    rycos.com [rykos.com]

  • Not too bad a deal (Score:5, Funny)

    by r_j_prahad ( 309298 ) <r_j_prahadNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:02AM (#9867008)
    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....

  • I remember... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:03AM (#9867011) Homepage
    Back in middle school, using lycos picture search for porn. Bout the only thing its ever been good for...

  • This is proof of Wall Street's 'casino mentality' (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iamcf13 ( 736250 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:07AM (#9867028) Homepage Journal
    How much is a company really worth when all the BS is stripped away?...
  • .... is simply modern Lycos-suction
  • 102 Million is still a rip off. Original was in the billions? And people wonder why the economy went bust!

  • The Investors Creed (Score:4, Funny)

    by Velcroman98 ( 542642 ) <`Velcroman98' `at' `hotmail.com'> on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:25AM (#9867078)
    It's supposed to be buy low sell high, did they forget?
  • So, Lycos...

    ...what will you do when Korea is reunified? [slashdot.org]

  • My how times change (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jlink7 ( 802246 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:41AM (#9867125) Homepage
    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.

  • Wha? (Score:2, Funny)

    by gwoodrow ( 753388 )
    Lycos was still around?
  • Good afternoon,

    I would like to offer my web-portal development services to investors from around the world. Any group that would like a lycos-like portal may nominate a lead investor and make a $100,000 (USD) non-refundable deposit into my numbered swiss bank account. Upon receipt of funds, I will entertain your request for a Lycos-like site. I am confident that I can deliver Lycos-like functionality for merely $50M (USD). Additional features may require additional cost. After the evaluation period, I

  • but Lycos is the best place in the Internet (Score:3, Funny)

    by rggoldie ( 513293 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @02:52AM (#9867448)
    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 [lycos.com]
    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.

  • Evidently... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chordonblue ( 585047 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @03:02AM (#9867489) Journal
    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!

  • ...I searched Lycos for "puppies" and I got these ads for restaurants!

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