Now that it’s official, the new owner of Lycos, Daum, gave an interview to the WSJ (sub required).
Daum is South Korea’s biggest Internet-service provider, with more than 35 million registered members. It caters to a Korean audience with a vernacular Web portal that features shopping, games, chat rooms and job-hunting services.
In acquiring Lycos, Daum believes it can succeed in the U.S. market by introducing some of the hallmarks of its Korean service, such as features that allow users to build personalized multimedia Web sites. Daum also said it plans to upgrade Lycos’s e-mail and search engine.
Hmmm…sounds familiar. Sounds just like another company with aspirations to enter the US market by buying a portal….oh yeah, Terra, former owner of Lycos. I dunno, but it seems like a rough time to be entering the portal wars in the US. Yahoo, Google and MSFT have fistfuls of cash and monster brands. Good luck Daum…but I smell another sale – maybe of component parts – in Lycos’ future.
(thanks, Rafat)
Another viewpoint John could be that with 35m subscribers, that just under $3 per user, and that might be cheap considering what Lycos could offer in terms of platform & application integration (perhaps – pure speculation.)
Add on the portal properties, audiences etc and depending upon which side of the fence you view this one – they could have landed themselves a real bargin (how many billions a few year’s ago)
As you point out, they would have to be rather gutsy to take on the big 3, so I’m my mind the first logical next step is potential mergers. It would be a nice 2-way set-up (you help us in the U.S, we’ll help you in S. Korea.)
I don’t know….but I think we will start to see more keiretsu’s being formed as the big 3 start to flex those fat wallets.
It would be nice to see the Wired properties spun back out to Conde Nast. Wired (the magazine) should be doing a ton with the Web and they’re pretty much handcuffed until they get their domain name back.
John, what’s your take on Wired News’ fate? Conde Nast has always wanted to buy it back, but wanted to pay no money for it, as usual. I feel that it might be better for Wired News to remain separate or align with someone else, just because Conde Nast has no idea for running anything which has a frequency higher than a monthly….ok, weekly.
Smart move by Daum. On the cheap they get Lycos eyeballs. The personalized multimedia websites are blogs and homepages with Tripod. Nice focus. They may be looking for a search engine. LookSmart could be a target. the unused spidered index of Wisenut needs a good home.
I think Wired News is a great service with the wrong owner. It’d be a perfect online complement to Wired magazine, but I think with some rejiggering, it could make a go of it alone as well.
Shame on Telef