Lycos may be up for sale soon and available for acquisition by Google, MSN, Ask or Yahoo – if they want it. Terra Lycos is hoping to sell Lycos for cash or liquid shares according to a CNet report. No set price was listed however a source familiar with the dealings tld CNet that Terra Lycos is looking to sell Lycos for $200m, based on $98m in revenue that the site generated in 2003.
Spanish Internet firm Terra Lycos has reportedly retained investment bank Lehman Brothers to look into the possible sale of its US counterpart Lycos and its properties.
According to CNet:
A sale of the unit would unwind the $12.5bn merger of Lycos and Terra Networks, struck in 2000 at the height of the dot-com bubble. Now, with a resurgence of online advertising spending, Terra is seeking a buyer for the Lycos division as it focuses on its Spanish- and Portuguese-language businesses, according to the document, prepared by Lehman Brothers and circulated to prospective buyers over the past several weeks.
Lycos’s advertising based revenue structure was largely dependent on Google AdWords, which are distributed on U.S. properties including Angelfire, HotWired, Lycos.com, Matchmaker, Quote, Raging Bull, Terra.com, Tripod, Webmonkey, WhoWhere and Wired. In addition to the Google AdWords deal, in which Lycos is the largest network serving Google contextextual AdWords advertising, Lycos also signed a 5-year deal with 24/7 Real Media to outsource display ad sales, ad serving and analytics for its Internet properties. The base Lycos network ads are driven by Google AdWords contextual text ads. According to sources 24/7 Real Media may be making over $10 million on the deal.
Despite the intended selling off of Lycos by Terra, Lycos does prove to be a revenue generating, if not profitable, search related portal.
