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Take a look at the GoTo income statement for period ending Sept 30, 2000. As I read it, there's a widening loss as these partnering deals are made.
[biz.yahoo.com...]
Compare that to the balance sheet showing about $100 million as available current assets (cash and investments).
[biz.yahoo.com...]
If I'm reading it right, GoTo is going to have to come up with some serious cash in 2001.
They simply need more clicks to turn things around and partners will help them to do that.
Will they have enought time? That will be down to the investors.
I'm no accountant either, but I noticed the big item on their Income Statement is $35 million for "amortization of intangible assets". This is the bulk of their net loss. I think we'd have to dig into that number, line item by line item, to understand their position. The accounting of intangibles can be a rather fuzzy world.
On their cash flow statement [biz.yahoo.com] "amortization of intangible assets" is just short of $80 million. Again, I don't think this tells us much, but it's one of the biggest numbers being thrown around.
One of the positives of these partnership deals for GoTo -- not only is there some immediate cash infusion, but as top positions generate more and more traffic, they will drive up the bidding -- and that source of revenue will tend to increase in the coming months.
I think the whole world is still very weak in interpreting the financials for an information economy business -- as opposed to an industrial business. In the recent shakeout of dotcom stocks, a lot of people are reverting completely to old, industrial economy viewpoints. Just as the glossy-eyed idealism was false, so is the new pessimism.
As an example of the far-reaching differences, once the expense of building an information store has been incurred, that store can be sold to an indefinite number of buyers with very little further expense. Contrast this to a tangible goods company who incurs a parallel increase in costs for acquiring raw materials inventory every time a new customer is added.
I think GoTo's track record is one of understanding the information economy in a very deep and farsighted way -- I expect to see more positives from them.
GOTO COM INC (GOTO) Death date: Jun 12, 2001
What was that line from Apollo 13?
What would be really interesting to know is the type of click through rates from peoples GoTo listings at AOL etc, that style of display certainly doesn't scream "click me".
This seems to be the crux of the matter. Will the bidding income go up enough to reverse or narrow their losses? Also, is GoTo receiving or paying cash to be included in these SE deals? I seem to remember that they PAID someone, but I could easily be wrong on this. However, if they are buying their way into these markets, their cash drain just got much worse. I guess the 1st Quarter report will tell the tale.
I've only got one client playing the GoTo game right now.
They have the number one position on the regular AOL listing. When AOL added GoTo listings at the top (the client is number 3 in the GoTo results) AOL referals tripled. Yep, 3x the pre-GoTo referrals from AOL.
For this business, which is very oriented to the "AOL demographic", it has made the difference between losing money and having their first profitable month.
I just noticed something today on AOL -- they put the site descriptions into JavaScript rollovers for the GoTo results, instead of just putting them on screen. We'll see about this -- on first glance, I don't like it much. They also moved the GoTo results to the "Web Pages" SERPs instead of "Web Sites". Now it takes another click to see them.
That's going to hurt.
Sorry to beat your brains about this Tedster but I am assuming that the Goto listing is targeted at the exact same term as the regular AOL listing and at no other. In other words same number of impressions?
Additionally even though it's early days have you noticed a drop in clicks, once the initial "wonder what that is" clicks have been made.
BTW This may be a good opportunity for some of the [big]Lurkers[/big] out there to make a contribution, there cannot be many people in Tedsters position of having a No1 at AOL and a corresponding Goto listing, we need all the data we can get.
Yes, the GoTo listing and AOL listing are on exactly the same single keyword. I'm comparing apples to apples, here.
It was really odd to see the same site up at the top for a sponsored link and then at number 1 right below -- maybe that 1-2 punch was a big factor in boosting the clickthroughs. Until today, I hadn't seen any fall off at all.
However, this business of moving the GoTo sites from the Web Sites returns over to Web Pages could to spoil the whole game. Today the AOL referals are cut in half.
FWIW, I haven't seen even a blip on the radar from HotBot adding the GoTo sites yet, and only a slight nudge at Netscape, which never amounted to much, anyway.
We'll see tomorrow if Alta makes a difference -- a lot will depend on how they format the page. We've got poor rank over there, so any new referrals will show up in bright colors.
Tedster, that sounds about right. Remember when NBCi was playing with the positioning? When they top-loaded the PPC returns for a few days, my traffic from my NBCi LiveDirectory listings dropped SHARPLY (I don't have anything in GoTo). A day or so later, they rejiggered the PPC slots and my traffic returned to 90% of what it had been.
I average about 150 hits a day for about $7.50 and make back about $7-8/day on searches back to goto using the befree affiliate links.
Yep... does not take a rocket scientist to figure that there is something wrong here :)
"We got back on track with paid introductions (paid clicks) in the third quarter, delivering a 21 million increase in the last quarter," said Meisel. "Price per click was flat this quarter, but in retrospect it's the logical consequence of our large increase in traffic. The implementation of one of our newer affiliate products, content-related links, also had an effect by significantly
increasing traffic to certain highly monetized terms. This in turn caused some advertisers to decrease individual bids to maintain their pre-set spending limits in the short term. We believe we are effectively addressing these issues."
The 1 cent bids are included in the 21 cent average.
