Lycos - is it worth it

[Joop]

I have been offered by lycos for 299gbp an opportunity that means whenever 'widgets' is searched for regardless of any other search terms, my site will be shown in a small box on the right hand side of the results page.

I'm not sure what the status is of Lycos anymore, whether its well regarded or not. I don't have many visitors from this engine, but maybe i'd have a lot more if my site was always on front of search results.

Is it worth the money?

[jetboy_70]

Remember that this is just Lycos UK and not .com. I have sites that get *no traffic* from Lycos UK at all, despite good rankings.

I wouldn't go anywhere near it, but this is an opinion not grounded in any personal experience of the scheme, just endless calls from their sales staff.

[nobody]

If it is their sales staff, try and avoid them. If Lycos was actually generating any traffic for any of my sites, or anybody I know, then it might be worth considering.

But they aren't, so IMHO, it isn't.

[ritch_b]

Although Lycos is a fairly well known brand in the UK, in terms of traffic drive it performs very, very poorly from past experience. Our 'natural' listings rank very well, but deliver nil traffic when compared to the same positions on other engines. It's all well and good appearing at the top for your keywords, but if nobody uses that engine, what's the point?

It's worth asking the question of whether you believe the £299 cost would result in more than £299 worth of additional revenue through your site.

If you spent the same amount of money elsewhere - adwords for example - would you recover your costs by this means instead?

My guess - although I don't know the ins & outs of your case - is that it simply won't be worth the expenditure and you'd be better off investigating alternative means of marketing, or just hang on to your cash! :)

R.

[Joop]

Thanks Guys, you've pretty much confirmed what i thought and i'll give it a miss. i divided the 299 by an average ppc and I get a lot of hits from other engines.

thanks again.

joop

[Bobby_Davro]

You might want to take a look at these:

[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]

[jetboy_70]

Is it worth the money?

That would be a 'no' then. ;)

[Gymonsear]

£299

They were going for £400-600 last year

I assume things are looking desperate for whoever has the contract to sell these

They are still managing to catch out the unaware though... as I have found in a few cases

Will Wanadoo be offering the same quality? with their "adwords" style links?

[bekyed]

Yes.

Still well clear of Ly****e, we are top in their directory with a nice wagging dog, no traffic hardly except from pay per click listings.
Ly**** used to be a major portal for the UK advertising on national television and then they just stopped crawling websites or took forever and people moved on to google and yahoo for much better results.

Bek.

[edited by: engine at 8:58 am (utc) on July 19, 2004]

[bekyed]

We do very well with wanadoo Uk using overture, remember newbies to the internet who have signed up with wanadoo (used to be freeserve)for their internet connection only use the wanadoo search box as they know no different se's exist yet.

Bek

[christopher]

Will Lycos die - like Excite?