Lycos Europe to close portal, end Web hosting

Lycos Europe announced on Wednesday plans to shutter its portal and Web-hosting business and find a buyer for three other areas of its business.

The company, which last month announced a 20 percent drop in revenue to 46.9 million euros ($60.8 million) and a net loss of 17.1 million euros, said the decision was made after reviewing its strategic options for several months.

It also plans to seek a buyer for other parts of its operation: its domains, Danish portal, and shopping activities.

Investors will vote on the management proposal at the company's December 12 shareholders meeting. Should the proposal receive approval, Lycos Europe will distribute 50 million euros to shareholders by year's end.

The closure of Lycos Europe's portal, which includes search, online communities, and content channels, comes as it faces increased competition from Yahoo and Google and a decline in user traffic.

[tacit]

Good. Can't come quickly enough. Lycos.co.uk is swarming with virus droppers, phish and malware redirectors, and other shady sites, which its abuse team has long been slow to act against--when they can be bothered to act at all. I've seen many fake eBay sites set up to steal account information that use scripts and redirectors located on Lycos Europe's servers, some of which remain active for weeks or even months after being reported.

The closure of Lycos Europe's Web hosting servers will do a fair bit to get a lot of spam sites, viruses, and phish sites off the Net.

[brisray]

no it won't, these people will just go elsewhere. All hosts, especially the free ones, end up having cretins using the space to do things they shouldn't be doing. I've worked with several free hosts over the years to help identify and delete or disable the worst of these and the sites I've found for lycos UK have all been deleted promptly.