I'm in 28.062. NSCP said Monday it has entered into an agreement that will bring Excite Inc.'s search
engine to Netscape's website.
The announcement, which came after the close of the market, may come as
surprise to market watchers, who believed as late as last Friday Infoseek Corp.
topped Excite's list of prospective partners for its Netcenter website.
Netscape (NSCP), the World Wide Web software company, and Excite, an online
service and search engine, said that the deal calls for a joint programming of
channels from Netscape's website and a co-branded search feature.
Netscape and Excite (XCIT) said they will develop content and search
services and sell advertising together.
The companies said the partnership will expand's Excite's revenue potential
and brand visibility. Netscape described the deal as the "catalyst for
Netscape's major push into the Internet portal space."
Under the pact, Excite will sell all the advertising for the co-branded
channel pages on Netscape Netcenter and for the Netscape and Excite branded
search engines. Advertising revenues from co-branded channel pages and
co-branded search results pages will be shared.
The pact also makes Excite's Classifieds2000 the preferred classifieds
provider across the Netscape service.
The pact calls for Excite to program a portion of Netscape's website and to
power a new Netscape-branded search service. The Netscape Net Search page will
be a combination of Netscape's new branded search powered by Excite, Excite
search and other search providers. The branded Netscape Search will provide
search results for the whole Internet as well as key links to Netscape
Netcenter programs.
Excite will also program a package of Netcenter's upcoming consumer
channels, including arts & leisure, auctions, autos and others. All the pages
will be co-branded.
Netscape will continue to develop additional channels through best-of-breed
partnerships for computing, business, finance, news, sports, entertainment and
local information.
Infoseek had been thought of as a likely partner for Netscape because the
search engine is already dependent on Netscape for about one-third of its
traffic. But rumored terms of that potential deal had some on Wall Street
scratching their heads.
Analysts said last week they believed Netscape was preparing for a deal that
called for the Internet browser company to license Infoseek's technology to
power its search service. The deal, the analysts said, would leave Infoseek
paying Netscape for traffic from its site and would have given Netscape access
to Infoseek's search technology. |
