Excite Inc, recognizing that classified advertising will probably become a lucrative source of advertising revenues on the web, has acquired privately-held Classifieds2000 for about $50.2m based on Excite’s closing price on Friday. The company will exchange 890,000 of its shares for all of Classifieds2000’s stock and Excite will count all the latter’s revenues as a pooling of interests and add its page views to its total. The company says that half of Classfieds2000’s corporate page views come from sources other than existing Excite users. At its recent conference in New York City, research company Jupiter Communications Inc urged media companies – especially ‘old’ print-and-ink media companies moving their products to the internet – to concentrate especially on the potential offered by hosting locally-based classified services. There are no aspects of user privacy to worry about, because users have put their information up voluntarily and users are already at the point of purchase, and ready to buy, making them very attractive to other advertisers, according to Jupiter. Classifieds2000 was founded in late 1995 by brothers Sani El- Fishawy (the president and CEO) and Karim El-Fishawy, (VP marketing). It got initial funding from Polaris Venture Partners and Broderbund’s online venture fund.
