Lycos.com Which Once Sold For $12.5 Billion Sells For $35 Million

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According to cnet.com, Lycos,com, one of the 1st internet search engines just sold for $35 Million to Ybrant Digital, an India-based digital marketing company.

Cnet.com points out that the site once sold for $12.5 Billion dollars in May 2000, then most recently sold in 2004 for just $95 Million.

You might be surprised as I was to find out that the site still draws some 16 million visitors a month.


About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

  1. BusinessWebsites.com says

    The AOL of Europe.

    Once the fastest company to go public from inception to IPO.

    They owned Quote.com and RagingBull.com which were sold in 2006, wonder how much?

    Anyway the company that sold today is not the same company that sold back in 2000 for $12B as many units were divested between now and then not to say significant devaluation did not occur.

    MHB, if someone had $2m to invest in domains back in 1994 when Lycos first received it’s 1st round of financing from CMGI what would that domain portfolio be worth today ? $100 M minimum, is this a safe number ?

  2. MHB says

    Business

    Back in 1994 there was cost or charge to register or renew domains.

    So if you had $2M to spend on buying owned domains at that point and registered what was available you would be Frank +1000

  4. MHB says

    Business

    Yes if you bought and registered the right domains and turned down all of the $5K, 25K and 100K offers over the years, a tall order

  8. Tommy Bolin says

    I used to use Lycos a bit back in the day but Alta Vista and WebCrawler were my favorites for a couple, three years.

    Wow….that was a lifetime ago. How things were so different then.

  11. john andrews says

    I remember doing SEO for Lycos… it was a good traffic source back then. You had to get it to come crawling… and if you were the only one in your market calling their crawling in, you ranked at the top.

  12. LS Morgan says

    Those Ybrant guys are apparently rising stars. Somebody at work the other day was talking about them, expanding their service offerings and possibly eying the US markets for a push to offer cut-rate marketing stuff on the cheap to smaller US businesses.

    I do wonder what came with Lycos @ 35mm as far as 2010-relevant technologies and if anything in terms of PP&E. This is the sort of buy we all look at and maybe snicker a bit, but I’d bet Lycos has better residual brand recognition figures than many of us might suspect (Hell, private equity bought the Shakeys Pizza operation on residual brand recognition alone) and with Ybrant targeting a lot of emerging markets where the tech-trenches aren’t as deep, this might have been a decent maneuver if they’re looking to aim for the moon and actually make a legitimate play at search.

  13. LS Morgan says

    Addendum to the above, though.
    I doubt they’re going to make a legit play at emerging-market search.
    They’re probably just going to use a retooled Lycos infrastructure and whatever traffic it has to first screen, then funnel relevant traffic to their paid marketing clients.