Excite Reports First Quarter Financial Results
PR Newswire - April 16, 1998 16:05
REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 16 /PRNewswire/ -- Excite, Inc. (Nasdaq: XCIT)
today reported revenue of $23.0 million for the first quarter ended
March 31, 1998, up 206% from revenue of $7.5 million reported in the
corresponding first quarter of 1997.
The pro forma net loss for the first quarter of 1998 was $ 6.0 million, or $0.28 per share. The pro forma net loss for the corresponding quarter of 1997 was $4.5 million, or $0.38 per share. (See Pro Forma Condensed Consolidated Statements of Operations Excluding Merger and Acquisition Related Charges.) Including $1.0 million of acquisition-related expenses, the net loss for the first quarter of 1998 was $7.0 million, or $0.34 per share. The acquisition of MatchLogic has been treated as a pooling of interests.
Network traffic rose to approximately 40 million average page views per day in March, up 48% from December. In addition, over 120 thousand Prodigy subscribers have registered to personalize their My Excite Channel start page since the co-branded alliance launched in late March. In total, over 6 million users have registered with one or more of Excite's personalized services.
Excite's monthly audience in February was estimated by Relevant nowledge to be close to 20 million unique users.
The Company booked $56.3 million of new commerce-oriented ponsorships in the first quarter. A number of these merchant partnerships provide Excite the opportunity to generate upside revenue by sharing a portion of the customers' transaction revenue in the future.
"Our growth was strong across all measurements -- traffic, unique users, registrations, bookings and revenue -- indicating growing consumer and advertiser validation of Excite as a leading gateway to the web and as a provider of highly personalized online services," said George Bell, Excite's President and CEO.
Operating Highlights:
* Excite Offers First Personalized Web Start Page. Excite's personalized My Excite Channel was awarded Editors' Choice by CNET in February, which called it "the ultimate Web start page". My Excite beat Yahoo!, Microsoft's start.com and others. Excite announced earlier this week, the conversion of its front page, www.excite.com, to a personalized start page, which allows users to easily customize their start page to deliver news, local weather, stock quotes, sports scores, daily horoscopes, TV listings and local movies.
Excite also announced supplemental personalization with free email, daily reminders, favorite columnists and personal shopping agents. By taking advantage of the Web's unique capacity for personalization -- delivering what consumers want anytime, anywhere in an easy-to-navigate online service -- Excite is building what it believes to be the surest path to increased consumer loyalty. The new personalized start page also improves the opportunity for high-margin, targeted advertising revenue.
* Classifieds2000, Inc. Acquired. Further strengthening its
personalization capabilities and building on its e-commerce strategy, Excite's acquisition of www.Classifieds2000.com on April 1st enables users to buy and sell goods and services through one of the Internet's largest person-to-person online marketplaces. Excite exchanged 890,000 shares of Excite common stock for all of the outstanding shares of Classifieds2000, Inc. in an acquisition that has been accounted for as a pooling of interests. Industry analysts, Jupiter Communications and Forrester Research, predict that the Web-based classifieds market will exceed one billion dollars by the year 2000.
Classifieds2000, already a market leader, will enable Excite to further develop local revenue streams and integrate classifieds services throughout the Excite network.
* First USA and Excite to Target Market Credit Cards on the Internet. First USA, owned by Bank One and one of the largest credit card issuers, announced a five-year, multi-million dollar marketing partnership with Excite and MatchLogic to market credit cards on the Internet. Leveraging MatchLogic's specialized targeting and ad serving capabilities with Excite's reach, the companies will match users' special interests to appropriate First USA affinity credit cards, thereby generating new accounts and further enhancing card-member loyalty through access to the breadth of channel content
on Excite.com.
* Excite Partnered with CBS TV Special, the Great Skate Debate, on the
Internet. For the first time ever, viewers of a live television show were able
to affect the outcome of an event by simultaneously voting online through
skate.excite.com, a URL which Excite hosted for the event. The participation
in this jointly sponsored competition was overwhelming -- over 178,000 people
voted during the performance -- and demonstrates the power of combining the
personal and proactive nature of the web experience with the reach of network
TV.
* WebCrawler Repositioned in the Consumer Marketplace. As a complement to
excite.com's traffic, which is heaviest during business hours, webcrawler.com
was re-launched in February to focus on consumers connecting to the Web from
home. WebCrawler already skewed higher for home usage as a result of its AOL
legacy, where it was the only search engine available for almost two years,
before Excite purchased it in 1996. The new WebCrawler service focuses on
being fast (fast loading pages) and emphasizes programming that changes daily,
while maintaining a simple search interface, topical channels of information
and personalization from Excite.
* Excite Extends its Netscape International Guide to New Territories. In
the continued roll-out of Netscape Guide by Excite, which is available on
Netscape browsers outside the U.S., Excite launched the guide in the UK, as it
has already in Germany and Japan. The simple format organizes
locally-originated content by topic. In other international developments,
MeinExcite was launched in Germany, making it the first and only personalized
service on the Web in Germany.
* MatchLogic Announces DeliverE -- targeted e-mail direct marketing on
the Web. Beginning in March, MatchLogic introduced DeliverE, a new opt-in,
e-mail service that allows advertisers to distribute selling offers and
marketing messages to highly-targeted audiences on the Web. MatchLogic's
Digital 1:1 data base is one of the world's most current and accurately
compiled data bases of its kind containing a wealth of demographic, lifestyle
and purchase intention data. Employing this database to deliver targeted
e-mail with the right message or offer, to the right person, at the right time
-- and knowing within seconds if that message is effective -- promises to make
DeliverE a compelling service to advertisers. Several advertisers signed up
for DeliverE at launch but requested that their names not be revealed for
competitive reasons.
About Excite, Inc.
Founded in 1994, Excite, Inc. is a global media company offering consumers
a free online service with a simple front end to the internet and extensive
personalization capabilities, and advertisers the best one-on-one marketing
services available online. The Excite network consists of two of the largest
brands on the Web, Excite (www.excite.com) and WebCrawler
(www.webcrawler.com) and its subsidiaries; MatchLogic, Inc.
(www.matchlogic.com), Classifieds 2000, Inc. (www.classifieds2000.com),
Netbot, Inc., Excite Japan Co., Ltd. (www.excite.jp.com) and Excite UK,
Ltd.(www.excite.uk.com). Localized versions of Excite are available in the
United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, Australia, and Japan.
Based in Redwood City, CA, Excite, Inc. has strategic relationships with
America Online, Inc., Intuit, Inc., Tribune Company, Itochu Corporation.
Forward-looking statements in this release are made pursuant to the safe
harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and
uncertainties, including and without limitation: the continued increases in
the number of companies advertising on the Excite Network as well as on the
Web generally; the Company's ability to increase sales of targeted
advertisements and to achieve higher costs per thousand impressions for its
advertisements; the intensely competitive environment for Web advertising
sales; the inability of the Company to maintain premier positions on high
traffic Web access points; reductions in market prices for Web advertising as
a result of competition or otherwise; increases in the amount of traffic on
the Excite Network and increases in the amount of use of the Excite Network by
Web users; the Company's increased operating expenses and negative cash flows
resulting from its recent acquisitions of Netbot, Inc., MatchLogic, Inc.
("MatchLogic"), Classifieds2000, Inc. ("Classifieds2000"), particularly
increased costs the Company expects to incur by maintaining MatchLogic as an
independent entity; the Company's the ability to integrate successfully the
services and technology of recently acquired businesses with the other
services offered on the Excite Network; anticipated costs associated with
marketing aimed at increasing consumer awareness of the Company's brands; the
increased use of the Web for commerce and the increased number of users
engaging in Web commerce through the Company's services; the ability of the
Company to develop and achieve consumer and advertiser acceptance for the
Excite Network in the international market; general economic conditions; the
other risks relating to the acquisitions of MatchLogic and Classifieds2000
described below; and other risks detailed in the Company's annual report on
Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 1997.
In addition, forward-looking statements concerning the Company's
acquisition of MatchLogic and Classifieds2000, including the forward-looking
statement concerning MatchLogic's and Classifieds2000's contributions to
revenues of Excite in 1998, also involve significant risks and uncertainties ,
including and without limitation: risks involved in assimilating MatchLogic
and Classifieds2000 while maintaining appropriate independence of their
respective operations; risks involved in retaining and motivating key
personnel who are not subject to noncompetition agreements; risks inherent in
MatchLogic's business, including privacy concerns arising out of MatchLogic's
database marketing activities, which account for a majority of MatchLogic's
revenues; other risks relating to these companies such as their extremely
limited operating history upon which to base any revenue projections; the
likely fluctuations in operating results of both companies' operations due to
factors beyond MatchLogic's, Classifieds2000's or Excite's control, the
reliance by MatchLogic on small numbers of customers for a substantial
percentage of its projected revenues, the acceptance by MatchLogic's
advertising customers of MatchLogic being owned by Excite (from which
MatchLogic purchases advertising) and the willingness by the other sites from
which MatchLogic purchases advertising (particularly those which are direct
competitors of Excite) to accept future advertising placements from
MatchLogic; and the acceptance by Classifieds2000's advertising customers and
distributors of Classifieds2000 being owned by Excite and the willingness of
Classifieds2000's advertisers and distributors (particularly those which are
direct competitors of Excite) to make future advertising placements on or to
maintain or enter into distribution arrangements for Classifieds2000's
services. |
