Lycos Europe

» see lycos.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

For about a decade there were two companies called Lycos and almost nobody using either one knew it. Which one you got depended on which country you were sitting in. From a modem in Turkey the address that resolved was lycos.com, run out of Massachusetts by the company that had come out of Carnegie Mellon. Type lycos.de or lycos.fr and you were dealing with an entirely separate business, registered in the Netherlands and run out of Germany, owned mostly by Bertelsmann and paying for the right to use a name that belonged to somebody else.

Lycos Europe was set up in May 1997. Bertelsmann brought money and a continent's worth of media contacts, and Lycos Inc brought the search technology and the brand. The new company was left to work out what a European internet portal was supposed to be, and its answer, mostly, was to buy one.

It bought Fireball, the German search engine, in March 2000. It bought Jubii in Denmark and Spray in Sweden. Through those deals and others it ended up holding Caramail and Multimania in France, which is to say it owned the two places where a French teenager of that era kept an email address and a homepage. Both of those already have graves here. Neither of them mentions on the front that the company quietly switching them off was a German joint venture with an American name.

Turkey never had a Lycos Europe portal, so this is one of those companies whose products I could reach but was never the customer for. What I had was the name, sitting in the row of search boxes everybody tried in 1999 before Google settled the question. It took me twenty-odd years to find out the name was licensed.

~ the dossier ~

~ two companies, one name ~

The arrangement was not unusual for the period. An American internet brand with no capital to expand would trade its name and its code to a local media giant for a stake in a new company, and the local giant would do the hard work of buying up the national portals nobody in California had heard of. What made the Lycos version strange was how long it outlasted the logic behind it.

Lycos Inc was sold to Terra Networks of Spain in 2000 for a sum everybody still quotes as the high-water mark of the bubble, and sold on again to a Korean buyer in 2004 for a fraction of it. Terra's stake in the European company came along for the ride, which is how Telefonica ended up owning a third of a German-run Dutch-registered company trading under a Massachusetts brand. By the end the largest shareholders were Terra with 32 percent and Bertelsmann with 20. The chief executive, Christoph Mohn, held 12 percent of a company his family had helped start.

~ what it bought ~

At its widest Lycos Europe ran portals in a dozen countries and claimed something like 19 million users. It had the search engines and the free hosting, but it also had the parts of a portal nobody remembers being part of a portal: a chat system, a dating service, a shopping comparison site, a domain registration business, a news aggregator called Paperball.

That was the whole theory of the portal era. Own the page people open first, then sell them everything else from the same page. It worked while a home page was something you set once and left alone. It stopped working when a search box got good enough that nobody needed the page around it, and the European operation had no more answer to that than the American one did.

~ the fifteenth of february ~

The company spent most of 2008 trying to sell itself and found nobody willing. On 26 November it announced it would shut down and sell what it could piecemeal. Shareholders met in Amsterdam on 12 December and voted to liquidate, and on the 19th they were sent 50 million euros, which came to 16 cents a share against a stock that had come to market at around 24 euros in March 2000. About 500 of the 700 staff lost their jobs.

The services went last. Lycos Mail, the European Tripod hosting and Jubii were all switched off on 15 February 2009, with users given a few weeks' notice in January to move whatever they cared about. The domain business and the shopping site were sold on as going concerns because they still made money. What could not be sold was the thing the company had actually been built to be, which was a front page for a continent.

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