Lycos wants to save the planet -- but only if it can also pull in the hits and not generate any negative press.
Last May, Lycos trumpeted a content agreement with EnviroLink, one of the most extensive sources of environmental news and information on the Web. The search engine-cum-megaportal plastered a "Lycos Saves the Planet" banner on a page devoted to EnviroLink content, which provided Lycos with daily coverage of environmental issues and an index of "green" businesses and activist groups. (At the time of this writing, the page is still up, but there are no links to it on Lycos' front door.)
It's been a busy year of content alliances for Lycos, which announced an agreement with WhoWhere on 11 August. The first Lycos/EnviroLink collaboration resulted in a special supplement for Earth Day this year.
"Our support of EnviroLink is another example of the commitment Lycos has made to promoting important issues like the environment," Lycos CEO Robert Davis enthused in a press release that called EnviroLink "the premier online resource for environmental news, products, and information."
On 10 August, EnviroLink founder Josh Knauer returned from his honeymoon in Scotland to find his organization's headlines, and the link to the EnviroLink page, missing from Lycos' front door. More alarming, the password that granted EnviroLink's staff access to the Lycos directories to upload new content had been disabled.
That afternoon, EnviroLink's attorney, Andrew Sussman, spoke with the general counsel for Lycos, Jeffrey Snider, who informed Sussman that Lycos' agreement with EnviroLink had been terminated. What happened?
"Contract issues -- non-performance," says Lycos spokeswoman Madeleine Mooney, declining to stipulate exactly how EnviroLink didn't hold up its end of the deal.
Enter an unlikely third player in the evolving drama: a feisty online magazine for motor-sports fans called Off-Road.com. With headlines like "Will Race for Beer," and columns called "Durt Byke" and "Mr. Dune," Off-Road.com doesn't seem like it would have a lot to say about EnviroLink.
Off-Road senior editor Norm Lenhart has plenty to say about EnviroLink, and composed an inflammatory editorial titled "Enviro? Link: Does Lycos Realize What They Are Supporting?" published on Off-Road.com earlier this month.
"Once in a while ... the quest for environmental righteousness leads corporate America down a primrose path, and straight into the wrong part of the forest," Lenhart opined, castigating Lycos for teaming up with the "radical environmental Web haven, EnviroLink."
Lenhart berates Lycos for allying itself with an organization that provides Web hosting for groups "who count amongst their goals, the elimination of the internal combustion engine" -- surely a touchy issue for the Jeep and 4-by-4-loving Off-Road.com readership. Most galling of all, Lenhart writes, is the fact that Lycos "itself is a great supporter of NASCAR/Busch Grand National racing. You've likely seen their logo on the in-car cameras, or trackside.... It gives one pause."
Now Off-Road.com is claiming credit for getting EnviroLink booted off Lycos.
Lenhart goes on to cite links, quotes, and image files from activist groups indexed in the EnviroLink Library, such as Earth First!, the Animal Liberation Front, and the Hunt Saboteurs Association. One site, called the Church of Euthanasia, appears to be a Church of the Subgenius-type archsatire, advocating mass suicide to save the planet and prescribing "urine sniffing" as a holistic treatment for stuffed sinuses.
Lenhart was not amused. Visiting EnviroLink's index, he says, "We learned that it's acceptable, and even encouraged to dress in a chicken suit, enter a business, and illegally place stickers of protest on products we don't approve of. We learned to pray to our feces. We learned that drinking urine is a seeming 'cure-all.'"
Most of the links in the article had never resided on Lycos, but only on EnviroLink's server, or on related sites.
Officially, Lycos denies any connection between the Off-Road.com flame job and the termination of the agreement. "It's absolute coincidence," says Mooney, affirming Lycos' commitment to "free speech on the Internet."
However, she then goes on to say that "If we have a link that says, 'save the planet,' and the links are to sites that you wouldn't expect to see, we don't want to do that either. That was of concern to us.... We're talking about expectations of users. Relevancy is always a concern to us." Asked to name a single site in the EnviroLink index that was irrelevant to the mission of protecting the planet from environmental peril, Mooney replied, "You'll have to go look through it yourself. Everybody has a different opinion."
While Lycos counsel Snider seconded the company's official line, he also echoed Mooney's expressions of concern about certain unnamed links, while stressing that "it was not the political spin" of organizations like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and Earth First! that led to the termination.
When pressed to specify the troublesome links, Snider replied, "Off-Road has named a couple for you."
Snider also reiterated Mooney's claim that displeasure with EnviroLink's business performance was the sole cause behind the decision.
EnviroLink's Sussman acknowledges that Lycos started grumbling about low hit counts last June, but Knauer says there were no traffic quotas in the contract with Lycos, save one. If traffic on the co-branded pages exceeded a certain goal, Lycos was to contribute US$60,000 to Envirolink -- following a contribution of approximately $40,000 to EnviroLink upon closing the deal.
To get an idea of the economies of scale between Lycos and Envirolink, that first contribution accounted for nearly a quarter of EnviroLink's total operating budget for this year. The second, traffic-driven contribution was to be even larger. Knauer contends that he had difficulties getting what he considered to be accurate traffic reports from Lycos.
Lycos also had a revenue-sharing agreement with EnviroLink for the ad banners running on the co-branded pages, but none of that revenue ever found its way to EnviroLink, Knauer claims. (The banners were supposed to be targeted to environmentally aware readers, but EnviroLink said it had to ask Lycos to remove banners touting Omaha steaks from the co-branded area.)
Traditionally, EnviroLink has depended on member contributions, foundation grants, and volunteers to stay afloat. The Lycos windfall, says Knauer, looked like "the best ways for EnviroLink to stabilize its income for the distant future."
For the moment at least, the planet may have to help EnviroLink save itself. A Friends of EnviroLink page launched by other groups to organize a Net response to Lycos and Off-Road is already up and running.
