Placing 16th on the top 20 sites ranked by traffic isn’t good enough for new Lycos CEO Alfred Tolle, concerned about the site’s actual visibility. During an interview with Frank Barnako, Tolle outlined a three-year plan to reposition Lycos as a web hub for consumer content and talked about a goal of going public again in 2007. The number of destination sites will be trimmed down from 42 over the next few months, with some of their services and features folded into stronger sites. He’ll use its trademark search as a hook, counting on “helpful search” that returns usable results.
He also listed Technorati as a possible acquisition that would fit with his vision of Lycos. “This is the kind of company we are looking at, seeing if they are acquisition potentials or whether we have the ability to do the same thing ourselves.”
How is Lycos going to stand out in the increasingly crowded consumer-generated space? Lycos still owns two of the sites that predated much of the ConGen craze — Anglefire and Tripod bring in 25 million uniques a month with a strong 13-19 demo.. That’s close to the amount of MySpace’s traffic but with far less of the cachet. If Tolle can figure out how to unleash the power of what Lycos already owns he’ll be a lot closer to that IPO goal. (Disclosure: I am an occasional contributor to Lycos-owned Wired News.)
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