Back in April I wrote about the recently filed IPO of GoTo.com, a
pay-for-positioning search engine whose business model was, in my mind,
unproven.
Two recent measurements of the company’s growth, however, indicate that
GoTo.com (GOTO) so far appears to be successfully executing its game plan.
Early this month the released its first quarterly earnings statement
since going public June 18. The results were impressive. I had called
the IPO premature, noting the meager $822,000 in sales last year and
concluding that GoTo.com “needs more seasoning and more revenue.”
Well, it’s getting the revenue. In the quarter ended June 30, GoTo.com
had $3.6 million in revenue, compared to $19,000 for the year-ago
quarter. For the first six months of ’99, GoTo.com’s revenue was $5.1
million, compared to $57,000 in the first half of 1998.
Granted, the search site was just getting off the ground last year,
having gone live in September 1997. (Which, of course, is why I thought
the IPO was coming too soon.) But even versus the first quarter, which
saw $1.5 million in sales, revenue growth is impressive.
More than 90% of GoTo.com’s incoming money comes from advertisers paying
for premium placement on GoTo.com’s search engine results. If you pay
GoTo.com more than any of your competitors, you get the top returned
item from the search.
While I had no doubts that advertisers would pay for such a service, the
real key for GoTo.com was attracting enough traffic, or eyeballs, so it
could charge premium rates for search result placements. And that’s
where I saw a problem: Web search users looking for information, I
wrote, “will bristle at being routed to a site that’s trying to sell
them something or boost traffic.”
Bristle though they may, they seem to be coming back to GoTo.com’s site.
Figures released Aug. 20 by Internet traffic measurement firm Media
Metrix show that GoTo.com visitors increased from 4.7 million in June to
7.3 million in July. That’s 55% growth in one month, and it moved
GoTo.com from No. 27 to No. 20 among digital media/Web properties.
Market reaction to GoTo.com was reserved at first. The stock closed on
its first day of trading in June at $22.38, just 49% above its $15 offer
price. GOTO shares caught fire (along with many other Internet stocks)
in July,rising as high as $69.88 on July 6. From there a long slide
extended into August. Since the Aug. 5 earnings report — which showed
at 2 cents per share loss, beating analysts’ expectations – GOTO shares
were up 25% through Friday.
With a market cap of about $1.6 billion, GoTo.com is still pretty
pricey, valued around 130x this year’s $13.4 million revenue (as
estimated by Donaldson Lufkin Jenrette). If it continues to grow traffic, the numbers should become more attractive.
Introducing Internet StockTracker, the new weekly e-mail newsletter from
internet.com Corp. Every Friday internet.com will deliver to your e-mail
in-box the latest performance data on individual Internet companies and
their competitors. Internet StockTracker will deliver to you all the
statistics you need to assess the week’s activity.
Subscribe today and receive the Charter Rate of $157 — a savings of
$70 off the regular subscription price!
e-newsletters
