The news that InfoSpace will acquire TaxACT for $287.5 million came as quite a surprise to industry observers who were shocked to learn that InfoSpace still exists, let alone has $287.5 million.
Once a high-flying darling of the dot.com bubble, I’d just assumed that InfoSpace had long taken its well deserved place in the Internet fossil record alongside such colossal local failures as Brigadoon.com and Home Grocer. So learning that InfoSpace still lives was kinda like hooking a coelacanth.
But what does InfoSpace do? Naturally, I Googled it. And apparently, InfoSpace runs vintage metasearch engines like Dogpile and Webcrawler… URLs I last visited about the time I upgraded from my trusty old copy of Mosaic.
So could somebody please explain to me by what dark magic InfoSpace manages to cling to life?
I assume that that’s what’s left after they stole hundreds of millions of dollars from their investors. Either that or founder Naveen Jain just printed it up in the back room. Just hearing the names “Infospace” and “Naveen Jain” brings back horrible memories of Fucked Company and the sundry criminals of the dotcom boom. Jain belongs in a jail cell instead of a megamansion.
Maybe they still own patents that they get paid license fees for? Check the SEC filings.
Webcrawler! Holy shit! I haven’t thought of that since the 1990’s I think.
Webcrawler was how I first surfed for pron. Slowly watching the jpegs of Pamela Anderson load.
Dogpile! I remember Dogpile…
They license a lot of their stuff to other companies to do metasearches. When you check Orbitz, for example, it will run its own search on many other websites, delivering what’s called aggregated search results. That’s just one example, but that’s the kind of stuff Infospace has been doing lately. It’s a decent business.
What’s unknown is if they’re still ripping off investors.
They made money doing search, added a lot of directory services, then ran WAP mobile services for mobile carriers and sold ring tones.
AOL users.
You might be high, Goldy, but I doubt you were a darling of the dot-com bubble. Dangling modifier alert in Paragraph 2.
Having survived a few accounting scandals, dot com and housing bubbles, it still manages to employ 200 people, its a totally legit company with Jain long gone.
I know you cant post anything from CES, because none of it is Apple related, but seriously, get a tech life Toby.
Their 2010 10-K actually makes for interesting reading. Apparently they also own some shitty niche commerce site: http://www.mercantila.com
“Goldy,”
InfoSpace is a Bellevue-based company. Did you consider calling them, asking questions? Did you consider calling some high-tech experts and asking them about InfoSpace?
The history of InfoSpace and how it managed to outlast so many others would have for an interesting story.
Or do you just let the “Wills in Seattle” crowd-source your information with the blatherings they post in the comments section?
Really, does anybody at The Stranger actually bother to do any work on a story or do you just post links, add some stupid remarks and hope something sticks?
@9 – Goldy entertained at dot-com IPO parties dressed as Shirley Temple. It was pretty goddamn darling.
@11, I was very excited to read about the top-rated bar stools and home fitness machines. They also offer a newsletter that gives you the inside story on products to complement your lifestyle.
infospace ever existed? didn’t know.
@benjammin509 – perhaps you should have been looking for a dictionary instead of “pron” 🙂
@16: Maybe you should get a current dictionary.
what was Brigadoon.com?
@ 18
Seattle Times sums it all up pretty well back in 2000.
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.c…
Goldy, this really bugs me:
“Once a high-flying darling of the dot.com bubble, I’d just assumed…”
It sounds like you’re the high flying darling.
Having worked there from mid 2001 to late 2002, I was amazed to see they still exist.
Naveen Jain needs to be locked up. Eventually he’ll run out of money in his children’s trust funds.
Ad revenue
Fucked Company – haven’t heard that name in a long time, hah
They’re one of the biggest sellers of ring tones worldwide. Hundreds of millions a year.
@13 (and 20)… I can totally see that! I hope they made him wear underpants with that frilly little dress.
Infospace has been out of the mobile content and platform hosting business since late 2007 when they sold that division off to Motricity, which has since run it into the ground after taking a lot of people’s (including Carl Icahn) money. Ryan Wuerch and Naveen Jain are peas in a pod.
@13: No, I haven’t done drag since college.
Y’know, it might seem really, really weird to tech-news junkies to say this, but… nobody, not even the almighty GOOG, makes money from search*.
Interweb companies make money from subscriptions, ads, ad services, or business-to-business contracts**. And not a few of them make their money before they actually earn it.
And it should take a genuine news reporter with a voice-capable telephone about 15 minutes to figure out what exactly a given interweb company is feeding on, in that fishbowl.
* or from “browse”, or from “push”, or from “portal”, etc etc.
** or from actual sales, in which case they’re just muggle Retailers, instead of True Wizard Internet Businesses.
I’ve read and reread this, and still can’t figure out how they have any money: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infospace
I guess in other words…
OH FOR THE LOVE OF [PASTA|JESUS|JEWGOD|BOMBHOMMED], GOLDY, YOU NOW HAVE THE AUTHORITY OF AN ACTUAL NEWS ORGAN BEHIND YOU, SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU ASKING US WHY WE, YOUR READERS, HAVEN’T FIGURED OUT THIS STORY, INSTEAD OF GOING OUT AND TRYING, UNDER THE AUSPICES OF YOUR OWN OFFICIAL GODDAMN FUCKING NEWS ORGAN EMPLOYER, TO ACTUALLY FIGURE OUT WHAT IS UP.
#29
Was the exuberance any more irrational?
#28
Yes, and in some sense, as absurd as it sounds, Google as public company is a failure…or even, a long con, since for years they have not exceeded the historic high price of their stock.
Facebook, which has yet to IPO, is another example of something where they give a lot of resource away for free, to get users, to get advertisers, to make the business “look good” and then jack up the IPO even with a P/E ration that is stratospheric in the hopes that 20 years down the line whoever (you, the 401k owner) is left holding the bag won’t have been completely tied, bound and left for dead…
@32
Eh, the GOOG is no more a failure than IBM. The Big Long Bet has paid off often enough to make it worthwhile to risk a fat stack of chips on a solid new-ish company and see where it goes. I’m sure you can find piles of pop-investing books that tell the stories of companies that, financially, underperformed woefully in the ’50s or ’70s, and now own the whole damned planet.
I suspect Facebook will do just fine; they’ve got way too much demographic data stockpiled for anyone to ignore. Granted, Zynga’s royal circle didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but I think Zuckerberg’s courtiers will all comfortably reaffirm their membership in the upper echelon of the American Aristocracy, post-IPO.
!
@32
Also, GOOG went public in ’04, peaked in December of ’07, and today is trading at about 13% below that ’07 high. So yes, it’s true that “for [4] years they have not exceeded the historic [Christmas 2007] high [+13%] price of their stock.” And the company as a public entity is less than 8 years old. Emphasis added.
The websites that the company owns, along with the hundreds of websites that you’ve never heard of that provide a search box which get their feed from Infospace, constitute about one half of one percent of the total searches made in the world. But what most people don’t seem to understand is that search ads are ridiculously lucrative, and half of one percent is worth around $200 million per year. This is, of course, how Google makes so much money while providing everything for free.
INSP is an interesting story actually. After Naveen they cleaned the place up and began generating significant cashflow. They operated an on-line YP business, a mobile infrastructure and content business as well as the current search business from 2002 through 2007 when they sold the YP and mobile assets at high prices, before the 2008 crash. They dividended over $500 million to shareholders and kept around $200m cash and the search business. They have built up the cash from operations and now are investing it in this transaction. Not bad for a “Fucked Company”