One of the four original search engine-cum-portal sites, Infoseek Corp has recently allied itself with Walt Disney Co, thus ensuring that it at least has one way of differentiating itself from its competition. That deal, announced last month and is yet to close, involves Disney taking a 43% stake in Infoseek in return for $70m and Disney’s ownership in the Starwave web design and development firm, which includes its joint venture interests in espn.com and abcnews.com. But before all that comes to pass, Sunnyvale, California-based Infoseek yesterday released its last set of pre-Disney deal figures, and pretty good ones they were too. It turned in net losses of $1.3m, down from $12.5m losses previously, although they included a $7.3m restructuring charge, on revenues that 119.2% to $17.1m. t the per share level the losses were four cents, three ahead of First Call estimates. However, traffic on the site actually decreased compared with the previous quarters – down to 20.3 million page views in June from 22.1 million in March – but this is due to a poorer performance from Netscape Communications Corp’s Netcenter site, which accounted for a 1.9 million drop in Infoseek traffic, according to the company. Infoseek decide to renegotiate its deal, and now purchase 15% of Netscape’s search rotation, down from 35% over the prior twelve months. Netscape contributed 13% of its page views in June. For the six months Infoseek lost $3.1m, down from $17.0m, including the above charge, on revenues that were up 124.7% at $31.5m. Cash at the half-way stage was $67.3m.
