Lycos' Tuesday announcement, that it is paying US$58 million to buy Tripod, is all about homepages and traffic. The venerable search-engine company sees Tripod's 941,000 members and their 1.5 million pages as a source of eyeballs that will help Lycos keep pace with its search/directory rivals.
As they emerge as big-time traffic hubs, Tripod and other communities, such as Geocities, Angelfire, and The Globe, are trying to attract new members by offering page-building tools. The purpose: to allow construction of ever cooler - and more attractive and potentially lucrative - sites.
Tripod itself illustrated the trend Monday in a deal with multimedia software company Parable. Tripod members will get discounted use of Parable's ThingMaker tool to design, incorporate, and digitally copyright homepage animations.
"We're trying to let people build really terrific pages without having to learn Perl or programming," says Ethan Zuckerman, vice president of research and development at Tripod. "Better homepages mean more pageviews, and that's more money for us."
The idea of the homepage communities is simple - build interest areas, offer tools that allow users to build homepages in those areas, and then incorporate chat, professional content, and community tools to bring the whole lot together.
Besides the Parable partnership, Tripod has similar offerings from start-up tool companies like Xoom Software and Art Parts, providing users with graphics and painting tools. Members can also load up their Web pages with guest books, answering machines, polls and quizzes, as well as customizable games like hangman. For an additional $3 a month, members can access a large library of images, and put a personal chat room on their page.
GeoCities also offers plenty of gadgets to its 1.5 million members. Free packages include basic page-building tools and fairly limited toys like the 3-D Photo Cube app. If users want the fancier implements, they must ante up $4.95 a month for the GeoPlus program, which offers tools like page counters, search engines, address books and surveys, plus a Web clock with a "a pre-programmed countdown to end of century in days, hours, and minutes."
A recent deal with Netopia software means that even wealthier GeoCities members can buy the Virtual Office software for $49.95, putting real-time conferencing, chat and Internet phone, picture galleries, and other work-related tools on GeoCities-hosted Web sites.
"We think we can offer the broadest array of tools and programs for our homesteaders; plus we offer the largest community on the Web," boasts Dick Hackenberg, GeoCities' vice president of marketing.
For start-up software companies, the community homepage sites change the playing field by offering a base of hundreds of thousands of people who will get a chance to use their products. The partnerships often involve software sales promotions: The Globe, for example, has cut a deal that allowed users to sample and get discounted copies of Microsoft's FrontPage software.
"From our perspective as a start-up, the target audience we're trying to reach is the burgeoning market of homepage builders," says Eric Bedell, the president of Parable. "[The Tripod partnership] is a great opportunity to get our file format out there in a ubiquitous fashion."
Some analysts, however, are frankly skeptical that such tools have any influence on getting users to join Web communities or that they're used by current members.
"At first glance, it's really rudimentary stuff. There are some well done sites on Tripod, but it's still very much amateur, and those are people who could care less about technology," says Patrick Keane, an analyst with Jupiter.
Still, getting outside visitors to member pages is crucial. The commercial logic argues that better homepages - and a better overall collection of sites - attracts more traffic to the communities. That can be accomplished by offering more and better site-building tools, or, as in GeoCities' case, simply by being aggressive about taking down inactive pages.
"The whole idea is like a garden - make sure it's watered and weeded, make sure it's beautiful and meaningful," says GeoCities marketing chief Hackenberg. "The key gets down to eyeballs - you have to have an important audience, and the advertisers want to reach the upper-class audience of the Web."
