Thanks Heather....in this article, note in particular the comment: We tell you why these companies were the darlings of investors in 1999
Wonder when the rest of Wall Street will finally "GET IT".... If I had an account in any of the major firms where they handled the investing for me, and I found that GNET wasn't in my portfolio....believe me, some questions would be asked!!! ... and most probably, the account/s moved to another brokerage!
KLP
To quote from the article....(bolds mine)
So come along as we look at five stellar performers among the Bloomberg 100, each in a different technology sector. We tell you why these companies were the darlings of investors in 1999, and what the new millennium holds for them and their competitors. If you were smart enough--or lucky enough--to buy these five stocks 12 months ago, your average return would have been 781 percent. Can the market produce winners like that again in 2000? Yes, sure. Will it? You can read last year's warning again--or you can read on.
Internet Content
For anyone who's ever noticed that the World Wide Web is a confusingly vast collection of sites, Web networks have an old-fashioned answer: Go with the brand you trust. For the last four years Go2Net (GNET) has been building an all-purpose Internet stopping place. The Seattle company now offers, among other things, search services (metacrawler.com and dogpile.com), financial information and advice (siliconinvestor.com), Website hosting for about 500,000 small businesses (hypermart.net and virtualave.com), an auction site (haggle.com), and an on-line payment-authorization service with more than 43,000 customers (authorize.net).
"Picture networks as malls that bring in the traffic," says Arthur Newman, an analyst at Schroder & Co. in New York City. "Many small Website sponsors don't generate any traffic at their freestanding sites, and many never will. So they are very willing to be linked with a branded network like Go2Net or Yahoo! that has the viewers."
The strategy's working. By July, Go2Net was ranked 9th among digital media/Web properties as measured by Media Metrix, with more than 11 million unique visitors. That was up from 77th in January 1998. Go2Net's primary revenue stream is advertising, but merchant-account, site-hosting, and transaction-processing fees are growing--rapidly. Revenues have gone from less than $600,000 in 1997 to more than $22 million in 1999. Go2Net's stock split twice in 1999, and soared from an adjusted $5.50 per share to $70.06, a stunning 1,167 percent 12-month return. Watch for the company to grow its stable of properties. Russell Horowitz, CEO of Go2Net, comments, "We do three things at Go2Net every day: We eat, we breathe, we acquire. We will add depth to what we own and move into new categories." Indeed, in November the company announced a deal with Net2Phone to enable users to send and receive phone calls, faxes, and voice mail from its sites.
The Competition: Call them what you will--portals, search engines, retailers, or Web networks--their objectives are basically the same: Get lots of users clicking on their sites. Go2Net is certainly one of the leaders, as are AltaVista, Go Network, Yahoo! (YHOO), one of the original portals that offer multiple products via integrated sites, and Internet service providers like AOL. The battle to build traffic will only escalate in 2000. Excite@Home (ATHM) and Lycos (LCOS) are compiling Web networks. Amazon.com (AMZN) has gone way beyond books to become an e-partment store displaying the wares of hundreds of vendors. In the convoluted economics of the Internet, upstarts like AllAdvantage.com, GoToWorld, and Desktop Horizon are even paying people a pittance to browse their sites. For the time being, there is enough audience growth to feed all comers.
GNET projection: Consensus earnings surveyor I/B/E/S projects 53 percent growth annually over the next five years. The top line is expected to double in 2000.
Sector projection: Analysts are predicting annual earnings growth of 25 to 40 percent for the next couple of years. |
