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To: MeDroogies who wrote (73380)	12/7/1999 12:43:00 PM
From: Red Scouser	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

ltaVista, Lycos will not merge - CMGI[CMGI-news] By James Ashton LONDON, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Internet venture company CMGI Inc. on Tuesday poured cold water on newspaper reports that portal AltaVista would be merged with rival Lycos Inc. [LCOS-news] to better compete with market leaders Yahoo! and America Online. "Don't forget Lycos is a joint venture with Bertelsmann AG < here (in Europe) so it's actually very difficult to effect a merger," Marcus Bicknell, CMGI's European President told Reuters. "Lycos has floated -- it has its own life and its own flavour and with new ownership I see AltaVista pursuing its own course," he said at the launch of altavista.co.uk, the British version of its site whose search engine covers 17 million UK-centred pages. CMGI bought 83 percent of AltaVista earlier this year from Compaq Computer Co. [CPQ-news] and has committed itself to investment in new technology and a $100 million U.S. marketing campaign in a bid to catch up on its rivals. CMGI also has an 18 percent stake in Lycos. In the key U.S. market, Lycos and AltaVista trailed top-rated Yahoo! Inc. [YHOO-news] in October with a third and a quarter of its audience respectively, according to data from Advertising Age. German media company Bertelsmann was in talks with Lycos in September on merging its Fireball search engine into Lycos Europe, with a view to floating the combined company in Europe. Bicknell said the widely expected consolidation of portals and search engines in the European market -- where homegrown offerings such as Wanadoo in France are battling with U.S. brands seeking a global audience -- would be unlikely to affect the top five players. "There's bound to be (consolidation) in those ranked five to 20... coming up you are going to see regrouping of some of those players." MAXIMISING ADS, E-COMMERCE He added that CMGI, which owns a stake in more than 50 Internet properties, would soon announce plans to maximise advertising and e-commerce synergies across its stable to increase yield. But he rubbished sky-high valuations of stand-alone dotcom companies. "I think that some of the big companies in Europe are putting too much value on start-ups in e-commerce. "When you have the synergy of lots of companies working together, passing traffic between each other -- e-commerce, community content and infrastructure -- then it works... but there is too much money chasing small opportunities." He added that the company practice of floating off stocks was set to continue with AltaVista. "CMGI has become something of an IPO machine, in the sense that we had six IPOs last year, probably another dozen this year, and I would be very surprised personally if AltaVista was not among them -- and early in the year." March, he said, "sounds pretty good to me". AltaVista said it will roll out localised services to Benelux, Italy, France and Spainin the next six months and relaunch its offering in Germany and Sweden later this week.