What’s the value of an old portal?

Lycos Europe, one of the struggling remants of the first webrevolution, want out of their Danish operation, Jubii.dk. They have officially asked an investment back to broker a sale of the once biggest portal on the Danish market.

I don’t think there are any surprises in this move by Lycos. The only interesting thing is, what an old portal model like Jubii.dk is actually worth?

The two biggest things Jubii.dk have got going for themselves are their users and their brand. Personally, I think the former is way more valuable than the second, which has been through a roller coaster ride during these last few years and is thus quite hard to really position in a strong way.

So basically, this could all come down to what the value of an end user is. And that may depend very much on the buyer. If someone like Aller would step in an make a bid, it may be worth a bit more than if it was somebody with no potential content partnerships to bring to the table. Just a thought.

A figure of around 200m DKK has already been thrown around. And that in itself is interesting, since mobile social network service ZYB with a far shorter - and user wise much smaller - track record sold to Vodaphone for 235m DKK. Maybe that’s the real testament to the value of an old portal in these flashy Web 2.0 days.

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