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Technology Stocks : America On-Line (AOL) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RTev who wrote (5738)	2/25/1999 6:17:00 AM
From: Roy F	Respond to of 41369

Opinions on the BBRS Tech Conference: Feb. 25, 1999: Tech '99 best of show -- AOL, eBay and Cisco America Online everywhere Keith Benjamin, Robertson Stephens's Internet analyst, lists America Online (AOL) as his only "strong buy" even though it's one of the few firms in his space that's trading at its 52-week high. The reason: America Online is one of the few companies that has a clear shot at capturing revenue from just about every trend in the Net revolution. Senior executive Ted Leonsis can put it in simple terms: "Our mission is to make AOL as central as the television and the telephone, but with more value." The company's growth metrics today are astonishing: It claims to be adding 1 million subscribers every 40 days. Its recently acquired instant-messaging chat product, ICQ, is servicing 1 million simultaneous conversations on any given night. 70% of people going online for the first time are starting with America Online. 50% of Americans, when asked without prompting to name an Internet company, answer America Online. The second-highest recognized brand, Netscape (NSCP), garners an unaided response from only 9% of Americans. (And America Online is in the process of acquiring Netscape.) The company has a backlog of $800 million in advertising that hasn't made it onto the site yet. The Netscape acquisition, when complete, will make the company, already No. 1 among home online users, No. 1 among workplace users as well. The company is on track to drag down $5 billion in revenues annually, and according to Leonsis, it's just getting started. Leonsis noted that America Online's e-commerce potential far outweighs its value as a content, community or connectivity provider, calling content just the tip of an iceberg. "You're just seeing the media part above the waterline," he said. "Underneath is a much bigger space, where we're aggressively aggregating dynamic IP addresses." That's a fancy way of saying that the mantra of the next America Online will not be "You've got mail" but rather "Are you there?" They'll use that information in any number of ways to bombard you with marketing offers so highly targeted that you might actually welcome them. How targeted? Leonsis notes that the company now has six major brands with which to segment its offerings and leverage its back-office infrastructure to a variety of demographics. Just as a Coca-Cola vending machine offers Fanta, Tab, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite or water, America Online now serves up Compuserve (men/workplace) Netscape (enterprise/daytime), Digital City (local content), ICQ (young, hip, urban) and MovieFone (leisure). The company has your credit card, and plans to offer you one-click shopping for everything from motion-picture tickets at MovieFone to business-supply purchases over Compuserve and a classified ad at Digital City. For investors, here's all the math that matters: You may recall from my previous columns that America Online is the second-best stock of the 1990s, a runner-up to Dell Computer (DELL). But if you start calculating on the day America Online went public in March 1992, the stock blows away Dell, with a 36,700% gain in the past seven years. Dell stock's advance over that time is 10,986%. Kind of e-mazing. moneycentral.msn.com