InfoTech: Lycos sold for USD36 million

According to Indian company Ybrant, "Lycos consistently averages 12-15 million monthly unique visitors in the U.S., and is a top 25 Internet destination worldwide, reaching nearly 60 million unique visitors globally. The Lycos Network of sites and services includes Lycos.com, Tripod, Angelfire, Gamesville, and HotBot."

Lycos more or less invented the concept of community websites, later developed into specialist areas such as Facebook and YouTube, both providing a form of web publishing in template form for the masses. It pioneered webmail with LycosMail, later overtaken by Hotmail.

But it never capitalised on its early lead, with others developing its inventive concepts to create much more successful enterprises. And it never had a large-scale advertising partner nor developed its own advertising platform in the style of Google.

Ybrant is the other side of the advertising equation: as an advertising platform, it reaches more than 20,000 million impressions each month, the company says. And it has a decent client roster: SAP, Porsche, Ford, UPS, Swissair, Chevrolet, 3M, Jeep, US Army, LaSalle and Lufthansa across a range of high-profile web publishers: MSN, Yahoo!, Viacom, SuperCook, Homestore, Move, 24.7Real Media, United Online, and About.Com. The company claims "direct access to over 120 top ad agencies - OMD, Carat, MediaCom, Group M, Quasar, Razorfish, Mindshare, Maxus, OmniCom and Oglivy" and coverage across Europe, the Americas and Asia.

Ybrant has agreed to buy Lycos demonstrating that fame does not equal fortune in the internet business: the price is a surprisingly low USD36 million.

The plan, Ybrant says, is to "combine the benefits of Ybrant's global network with what Lycos has to offer in creating a compelling global destination for our advertising clients worldwide."

That sounds suspiciously like the plan Yahoo! embarked on when it decided not to focus on search as its primary purpose.

Lycos has managed to turn its front page into one of the most amateur on the web: a search engine box up front: that's good. What looks like an RSS feed of five "latest news" items (the content scrolls in blocks of five) and a "featured free game" plus own-service promos.

Lycos has fallen far: Spanish ISP Terra Networks bought it in 2001 - for USD12,500 million. Just three years later, the public face of Lycos was sold to Korean company Daum Communications for USD105 million. Terra Networks kept some of the clever background tech out of that sale.

Daum will focus on its domestic business.

The deal is typical of so many deals in the tech sector involving Indian companies who have, for several years, been picking up languishing assets for a song: several companies bought undersea cabling for just 10% of the cost of installation during the tech crisis.