Terra Lycos lassos AltaVista's Raging Bull
The company says it has acquired the financial information Web site for an undisclosed amount of cash and will combine it with its similar existing properties.
In addition, the company said it acquired Iberwap, a Spanish company that produces Web-based maps and content.
Terra Lycos executives touted the Raging Bull deal as a way to combine the Web site into the company's existing financial information properties Quote.com and Invertia.com. The company, which has headquarters in Madrid, Spain, and Waltham, Mass., plans to maintain the Raging Bull brand.
Raging Bull becomes the latest Web site to be sold by Andover, Mass.-based CMGI, the majority owner of AltaVista. Palo Alto, Calif.-based AltaVista acquired Raging Bull in 1999, in a deal largely seen as a way for CMGI to bring two of its investments together to create more Internet value. But times have drastically changed since the deal.
CMGI was once a high-flying Internet investment company that rode the bull market through a series of public offerings. Now that online advertising has slowed and investors have grown weary of money-losing Internet start-ups, CMGI has watched its stock fall off a cliff. It once traded as high as $163.50, but was trading Tuesday morning at $6.63 a share.
Since last fall, CMGI has been slashing its portfolio of Internet companies to make its operations profitable. It has also slashed a number of jobs in its operating divisions, including three rounds of layoffs at AltaVista.
Spanish ISP Terra Networks in October completed its $6.5 billion acquisition of Web portal Lycos to form Terra Lycos. The company is attempting to compete with AOL Time Warner's America Online by offering content and Internet access, but with a stronger focus on Latin American Web users.