For the Bulls. OK Bateman you can look at this.
Anyone buying tomorrow. I am, believe it or not?
Ok, Mark I guess it's greedy time for me too!
<NEW YORK, Aug 10 (Reuters) - Despite the investor jitters that led most initial public offerings to get postponed last week, demand for the GeoCities IPO is strong enough that the deal's underwriter has raised the price range on the issue.
Goldman Sachs, the lead underwriter on the Internet offering, told Reuters Monday it raised the estimated price range on the 4.75 million share deal to $14-$16 from an originally-planned $12-$14. The company's stock is expected to begin trading on Nasdaq on Tuesday.
Typically, an eleventh-hour change in the price range of an IPO is seen as an indicator of the demand for the deal -- and in recent weeks, most of the new issues that have managed to debut in this choppy market have had their price ranges cut because of weak demand.
Internet-related IPOs have generally been immune from the investor jitters that have been weakening the demand for new issues, but some analysts believe the broader market correction of the past week may hurt some of the big Internet deals going forward.
With five hot Internet companies scheduled to go public in coming weeks, analysts said GeoCities -- the most popular of the group and the first one expected to hit the market -- will test whether that theory is true.
"GeoCities is setting the framework for the whole week of Internet offerings," said David Menlow, president of IPO Financial Network in Springfield, N.J.
GeoCities, based in Santa Monica, Calif., runs a popular service for creating an online community.
It provides free sites on the World Wide Web for about 2 million "homesteaders" that are arranged into online neighborhoods based on themes such as arts, family, finance, entertainment or sports. Providing the sites for free allows GeoCities to avoid paying for the content it needs to attract visitors.
GeoCities is so popular that it is rated among the most heavily-visited spot on the World Wide Web, behind sites from Yahoo Inc. <YHOO.O> and America Online Inc. <AOL.N>.
That information is very important to GeoCities' business model, since it gets its revenues from companies that advertise on its members pages -- though members can pay GeoCities to keep their sites free of advertisements.
In the same way that a newspaper's high circulation numbers helps lure advertisers, figures indicating high-traffic volumes to World Wide Web sites draw companies to invest on those Internet spots.
Analysts are mixed in their reviews as to whether this business model will establish strong financial growth for the company in the long-term. Like most Internet companies, GeoCities is not making money now.
While some analysts see the strong loyalty that GeoCities gets from its homesteaders a great way to attract advertisers, others said the company's exclusive advertising deals with a group of online retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. <AMZN.O> and CDnow Inc. <CDNW.O> could hurt profits in the long-term.
"These exclusive relationships limits their revenue potential going forward," said Mark Basham, investment officer with Standard & Poor's.
But buzz, coupled with fundamentals, has been a key factor in driving up the price of Internet stocks, analysts said. And GeoCities, they said, has the kind of high-profile investors and underwriter for the IPO that tends to get investor attention.
The deal is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs, and is 30 percent-owned by Softbank Corp. <9984.T>, which sold its publishing unit, Ziff-Davis Inc. <ZD.N>, to the public in an April IPO.
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