By Nick Patience
The Lycos Inc-USA Networks Inc combination, which was finally abandoned yesterday after three months of wrangling, was touted as the first complete combination of pure web play and an old media television company and was billed as the acquisition model of the future. Earlier this week NBC Inc followed suit and poured its internet resources into a new holding company called NBCi in conjunction with CNet Inc’s Snap.com portal and the Xoom.com Inc web community.
But just because this deal failed doesn’t mean the culture clash between the two mediums will prove insurmountable, far from it, in fact. America Online Inc has been rumored to have had its eye on CBS Inc for some time, but nothing has come of that yet and employee number one, president and CEO of Lycos Bob Davis, is not at all worried that he missed the boat by failing to secure the deal with USA.
He was asked yesterday on a conference call with the press and analysts whether he felt a sense of urgency now to get himself a television partner. I don’t think anything could be further from the truth, he countered. He points out that Lycos now has a deal with a TV company – a cross-promotion deal with USA as a caveat to the failed merger. I have what others have had to give away their company for, says Davis, who identifies personally with Lycos – I am the number one portal on the web, is how he describes Lycos’ current number one position atop the Media Metrix charts. He insists, media companies need us, rather than the other way round.
Davis believes that Lycos is in a better position now than it was when it agreed to the USA deal in early February and cites CBS, Time-Warner and a whole host of other TV companies that have no alliances with portals as proof that this trend has only just started. One enterprising type apparently put the lycostv.com domain up for grabs on eBay earlier this week in anticipation of just such a deal.
