Placing a big bet on the traffic-building power of an online community, search engine Lycos is acquiring homepage hub Tripod for $58 million in stock.
Tripod, based in Williamstown, Massachusetts, claims to generate more than 100 million page views per month, and is adding new members - who can construct their own homepages on the site that bills itself as a Web community - at the rate of 4,000 a day. Many of Tripod's 1.5 million members fall into the 18-to-34 demographic, which was particularly attractive to Lycos.
Lycos says that the acquisition will make it the fifth most popular site on the Web, reaching almost a quarter of all users. In a press release announcing the deal, Lycos also stressed its hopes that Tripod's homepage-building capability will cultivate a larger audience of users who spend more time on the site, and said that Lycos will index the content of user-built homepages, making them easier to find.
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