Juno's IPO cracks at open, could be 'broken'

In what's shaping up to be a bad day for Internet IPOs, Juno Online Services Inc. (Nasdaq: JWEB) flopped in its market debut and could be the second "broken" offering this year.

Comps.com (Nasdaq: CDOT) has the dubious distinction of being the year's first "broken" offering, where the issue falls below the offering price.

The 6.5 million share Juno offering priced at $13 and opened unchanged. Shares were trading 12 9/16 in morning trading. Meanwhile, DLJDirect (NYSE: DIR) posted only modest gains in its debut. StarMedia (Nasdaq: STRM), the other part of an Internet IPO trio, didn't start trading yet.

Juno's original price range was $11 to $13 a share. The company, which was known for offering free e-mail service way back in 1996, hopes to convert its free customers into paying ones.

Put simply Juno Online is becoming what the name implies -- an Internet Service Provider.

For the quarter ending March 31, Juno reported sales of $9.7 million and a net loss of $6.87 million. Of that sales figure, $5.8 million was from billable services, $2.3 was attributed to advertising and $1.6 million was direct product sales.

Juno offers services ranging from basic dial-up Internet e-mail for free to access to the Web for a price.

The company said it is developing numerous revenue streams by hooking free newbies and then having them trade up to become paying customers through services such as Juno Web.

Juno said its primary revenue sources will be subscriptions and advertising.

For 1998, Juno had sales of $21.6 million and a loss of $31.6 million.

In regulatory filings, Juno claims more than 6.8 million free Juno e-mail accounts have been created since April 1996. In March, the company said an average of 912,000 users dialed into the e-mail service a day, with 2.4 million user accounts connecting in all of March.

For Juno's billable services, Juno Gold and Juno Web, the company said it had 207,000 subscribers. The pay services have so far only been marketed to free e-mail clients. The company plans to market to a wider audience going forward.>