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Microcap & Penny Stocks : Zulu-tek, Inc. (ZULU) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PartyTime who wrote (9725)	6/30/1998 7:39:00 PM
From: PartyTime	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18444

Let's roll back in time for a bit and look at what they were asking about Doubleclick a few months ago. Will Wall Street buy 'em? You bet, check Doubleclick's stock price today: Up 8 3/16. The article below also indicates that Zulu will be "watching." Hah!!! Zulu hasn't been watching. Zulu has been building. Zulu, according to Blue Fox's observation, probably didn't get credit for its Netscape work on the list that was published today that had Doubleclick listed number three. Where would Zulu have ranked if it had gotten the advertising credits that were accorded to Netscape instead of Zulu? (see BlueFox post: Message 5066468 ) From The Red Herring: WILL WALL STREET BUY DOUBLECLICK? Probably. But the question over the long term is whether advertisers will buy banners. By Dan Mitchell February 18, 1998 Internet ad network DoubleClick is expected go public this week amid mounting skepticism. First, the company is losing money. Second, the ultimate success of the banner-ad model, on which DoubleClick has placed nearly all its bets, remains far from certain. One fact, though, stands out from the rest: DoubleClick derives nearly half its revenue from a single source -- Digital Equipment's AltaVista search engine. With Compaq in the midst of buying Digital, AltaVista's future is unknown. If AltaVista were for any reason to drop DoubleClick, the network would lose one of its 66 members -- and 45 percent of its revenues. That's not an impossible scenario: Digital has dithered plenty over what to do with AltaVista, and the DoubleClick contract includes a 90-day exit clause. "What Digital was going to do with AltaVista is probably what Compaq will do with it," says Evan Neufeld, an analyst at Jupiter Communications. But in the long term, "if I were at DoubleClick, I'd be worried with what's going on at AltaVista," he says. The company is in its pre-IPO "quiet period" and officials can't comment. But the firm has defended its reliance on AltaVista and a handful of other companies (65 percent of its revenues come from just four Web publishers) by pointing to the close ties it enjoys with those firms. DoubleClick employs a similar argument when it comes to the lack of growth in its network. The number of member firms has hovered around 60 for well over a year, but the company says it wants it that way -- so it concentrates on the revenue potential of its member firms, not on membership numbers. Still, with the Web growing the way it is -- and with several publishers actually starting to earn profits -- it's hard to understand the logic behind a no-growth strategy. Part of the problem is the fact that bigger sites such as Yahoo are using their own sales forces. And those big sites dominate the Net advertising market. "Just like in all media, all the cream floats to the top," says Mr. Neufeld. "People thought it would be different; they thought the top 200 or 300 sites would succeed." The trend toward managing ad sales in-house will continue, and as the pool of experienced Web salespeople grows, even smaller companies will have an easier time hiring them. For companies with their own sales forces, DoubleClick offers Dart, its ad-targeting service. Here, the company has snared some big-name customers, including ABC, CBS, and The Wall Street Journal. But this sector, which includes such players as Focalink, NetGravity, and Accipiter, is at least as competitive as the network space. And it's exposed to possible risk from government regulation: Dart makes use of users' personal information to target ads. While the FTC is holding hearings this spring on consumer privacy, it's unlikely -- but possible -- that regulation would affect Dart much. Of more long-term significance, there are already signs that eventually, even the smallest publishers will serve up their own ads as ad-serving software gets cheaper and easier to use For all the risk exposure, DoubleClick remains the Number One ad network, thanks largely to having been so early to market. And others in the network space, including Softbank Interactive (recently bought by Zulu-Tek) and 24/7, will watch closely to see whether Wall Street endorses the business model. But none of these companies has yet earned a profit, and Barron's may have had it right this week when it warned "those enraptured with price-to-earnings ratios" that, for them, there may be safer plays out there. Need to know the basics of Web advertising? Get briefed. Advertisers were looking "beyond the banner" even as far back as October 1996. Do you pay any attention to those busy little ads on Web pages? We hope so. Let us know.