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Technology Stocks : Ampex Corporation (AEXCA) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: valuehunter who wrote (6826)	4/7/1999 10:32:00 AM
From: Carl R.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17679

Now will they change their name to Ampex.com? <VBG> Now up to 3 7/16. Maybe we're starting that slow, steady "juggernaut" move. <VVBG> Carl Make that 3 5/8. Awfully fast for a juggernaut. <G> Volume is decent, but there are no sellers.

To: valuehunter who wrote (6826)	4/7/1999 11:34:00 AM
From: flickerful	Respond to of 17679

Portal Play Paybacks Paltry, Survey Finds By Connie Guglielmo April 7, 1999 9:42 AM ET Jupiter Communications said Tuesday that the highly touted multiyear, multimillion dollar advertising deals online retailers routinely strike with the major portal sites may not necessarily be good for business. In fact, the payback retailers expect for their promotional dollars - namely, new customers and increased sales - may be downright paltry. "These portal deals are probably over-rated," Gene DeRose, chief executive officer of the online research firm told a gathering of online retail, marketing and portal executives attending its Shopping Forum in Miami this week. While portal deals gained high marks for helping retailers with branding and for driving traffic to retail sites, the portal plays fell short of delivering the thing most commerce sites want: revenue. "Online commerce driven directly by the primary portals will grow only slightly from 18 percent in 1999 to 20 percent in 2002," Jupiter reported. "Although 92 percent of commerce players surveyed believe that portal tenancy deals help them to drive sales or transactions, over two-thirds attribute 30 percent or less of their online sales directly to portal deals." The poor return-on-investment led fewer than five percent of executives surveyed to categorize themselves as "highly likely to renew" their existing portal deals, said Marc Johnson, Jupiter's director of digital commerce strategies. Though "you can't swing a dead cat without running into a multiyear, multibillion dollar portal deal," Johnson said. Retailers should rely less on portals to deliver buyers to their doors and instead invest in a "diversified distribution strategy" centered around deals with affinity sites, affiliate programs that enable other Web sites to drive traffic to their doors and off-line marketing. Commerce partners should also demand more from the portals for their money, Johnson said, noting that portal deals should be based on actual sales performance - and not on traffic and impressions. Jupiter found that while 72 percent of the commerce sites it surveyed said that impressions were part of the portal deals they signed, only 41 percent said that revenue share or per-lead-fees were included, "indicating hesitation on the portals' part to tie contract terms to actual sales performance." The major online portals also came under the fire of online retailers, who said that plans by Lycos, Yahoo! and others to offer their members a universal shopping cart and wallet, which lets consumers shop across merchants, is a form of customer "hijacking." "Wallets are valuable things as long as someone doesn't come in and steal our customers," Jason Olim, founder of online music retailer CDnow told the 1,000 conference attendees. The portals' plans to act as an intermediary, collecting customer and purchase data that they then pass on to an online merchant, reduces the power of the retailer's brand by "commoditizing" the shopping experience. "Why would I want to join a wallet that might turn my customer on to competitors' brands," Mark Wattle, CEO of Hollywood Entertainment, said. Instead, retailers are better served by offering a one-click shopping feature that locks buyers into their sites. But Bob Davis, president and CEO of Lycos, said that portal is aggressively working on its plan to share in the consumer commerce dollars being spent on the Web by offering its members the "power of one" - a unified registration service that allows consumers to access through a single password "one e-mail address, one shopping cart, one credit card."