Lycos.Europe signs Overture

Espotting out!

[heini]

In a totally surprising act Lycos.Europe has announced a new deal with Overture.
Overture will replace Espotting, beginning August in the UK, and coming December to Germany and France.

Under the deal up to five PPC listings will be displayed on Lycos and Fireball serps.

Only last year Lycos.Europe had signed a 3 year contract with Espotting.
Obviously Espotting could not muster enough paying customers to meet the terms of the contract.

source:Lycos.de [pressroom.lycos.de]
Overture.com [corporate-ir.net]

[lazerzubb]

I do think Overture is starting to present better PPC for every day now, Espotting not that good, might be because they don't have the same index.

[Rumbas]

Auch!
Not good for Espotting. BUT maybe good for Overture and they do have more paying customers.

[heini]

>Not good for espotting

No, definitely not. The rise of Espotting very much resembles the familiar dot-com bubble & bust stories.

It's a business where size matters more than anything else, I guess. To make things work profitable you have to gather critical mass.

When Espotting got the deal with Yahoo.Europe Overture claimed they had agreed to conditions that resembled dumping practices.

We will see if this is the start of a chain reaction.

I don't think anyhow only one PPC company dominating the whole business is good for the industry.

[angiolo]

>Overture will replace Espotting, beginning August in the UK, and coming December to Germany and France.

Is it Overture UK or USA?

[heini]

Angiolo, Overture is about to open offices in France, Germany is up and working already. So I think submissions will get handled by local offices mainly.

Looking forward to the french KW tool.

Interesting note is, the deal with Overture guarantees Lycos.Europe 8,5 Mill € minimum for the 2 years duration. The original deal with Espotting was worth only 10,7 Mill. € for 3 years.
So perhaps Overture simply outbid Espotting...

[redlion]

I read somewhere that Lycos account for 3% of Espotting traffic, to put this in perspective.

And let's not forget that Espotting are partnered with Yahoo in Spain, France, Germany and the UK (Italy later this year). They've also got AltaVista and Tiscali in France, BTLookSmart and UK Plus in the UK, Netscape in Germany, France and the UK, Web.de...so basically they've got the size to make a profit, w/o Lycos.

Maybe Overture did outbid Espotting for Lycos - in which case, it may be they are taking a loss on this deal now as they try to counter Espotting's growth in Europe - at a time when Overture are loosing deals in the US to Google...

Definitely exciting times in the ppc market....the more players there are the better!