Infoseek Corp has become the latest content aggregator on the web to get financially involved with a web home page community company in the form of WebChat Broadcasting Systems Inc. Previously Infoseek’s rival Yahoo! Inc took a stake in the leader, GeoCities Inc and in February Lycos Inc acquired Tripod Inc outright for $58m. This deal is smaller than that, valuing WebChat at $6.7m based on Infoseek’s recent share price. The company is offering some 350,000 of its shares in the stock swap. Companies such as WebChat, GeoCities and Tripod offer users the chance to host their own web page for free. These homesteaders, as they are known, represent a rich target set for advertisers. Infoseek, using the figures from RelevantKnowledge, says WebChat gets about 5 million page views a day and together, they can offer an unduplicated viewership of some 14 million people and can claim a combined 21.7 million page views a day based on February’s numbers. WebChat claims 2.7 million registered users, which provide the company with detailed information that it can use to help it sell advertising.
