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To: EPS who wrote (3864)	7/17/1998 8:44:00 AM
From: EPS	Respond to of 4903

Hmm.. Friday July 17 8:12 AM ET Excite-ing quarter for Excite By MSNBC's Barton Crockett Get ready for more Internet stock turbulence Friday, as Web publisher Excite (Nasdaq: XCIT) Wall Street expectations after markets closed Thursday with better-than-expected sales and slimmer-than-expected losses for the quarter ending June 30, MSNBC's Barton Crockett reports. The company follows Web search leader Yahoo, which last week also blew past Wall Street estimates. "We were pleased with the strong revenue and bookings growth this quarter," Excite CEO George Bell said in a statement. Excite reported sales of $33 million, more than triple last year's total. Operating losses fell to $4.6 million, or 10 cents a share, from $6.4 million, or 26 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Analysts had been expecting Excite to lose 42 cents a share, according to a consensus estimate compiled by First Call. Results for the most recent quarter exclude $75.6 million of one-time charges stemming from a major new partnership with Netscape Communications Corp., an acquisition of Internet start-up Throw Inc., and other merger-related expenses. Traffic into Excite's Web sites rose to 44 million page views per day in June, an increase of 10 percent over March. AOL NetFind, powered by Excite, generated another 8.0 million page views per day. Excite said it booked $113 million of new business - primarily advertising and marketing deals - in the second quarter, up 80 percent from the first quarter. This brought Excite's total backlog as of June 30 to $250 million, a 60 percent increase from March 30. Excite's traffic was lower than the 48 million page views analyst Abhishek Gami, with William Blair & Co. in Chicago, had been expecting. But sales topped the $29 million of revenues he had predicted, and Gami said the backlog of business was especially strong. "These guys could almost go to sleep and make my numbers for the rest of the year," Gami said. Commerce-related revenue represented 23 percent of total revenue in the second quarter. The total number of advertisers rose 31 percent to 819. In the first two months of the new partnership with Netscape, Excite sold $39 million of marketing packages. Of this amount, $1.5 million was earned as revenue in the second quarter. Overall, online registrations for personalized services from Excite and WebCrawler - such as free e-mail - grew from 6 million as of March 30 to 9 million as of June 30.