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Lycos breaks ties with EnviroLink, one of its many partners
Wednesday, August 19, 1998 By Michael Newman, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Lycos announced no purchases, mergers, alliances, partnerships or even agreements yesterday. It was an uncommon lull for one of the most active companies in one of the most promiscuous industries since soap operas.
"The Web makes for a lot of potentially strange bedfellows," says Patrick Keane, an analyst at Jupiter Communications in New York City. For companies such as Lycos - which has announced two deals thus far this week and has struck no fewer than 31 since the beginning of the year - some of the relationships are bound to sour.
And the recriminations begin soon after the relationships end. Lycos, founded three years ago by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and currently worth more than $1 billion, now finds itself in a dispute with EnviroLink, a small, Oakland-based network of nonprofit environmental groups that also got its start at Carnegie Mellon.
Josh Knauer founded EnviroLink in 1991 while a Carnegie Mellon freshman. It began as a simple e-mail list to about 20 other student activists, and by the end of last year included Web sites, chat rooms, an environmental news network and other services, attracting some 375,000 visitors a day.
In May, EnviroLink signed a contract to provide environmental news and a directory of environment-related Web sites for Lycos, which bills itself as a comprehensive guide to the World Wide Web. Knauer expected EnviroLink to receive $40,000 this year through the partnership, helping defray an expected budget of more than $200,000.
When Knauer returned from vacation Aug. 10, however, he found that the group's links to Lycos - figurative and actual - had been terminated. Now he is crying censorship.
Lycos ended its agreement with EnviroLink shortly after an article in an online magazine criticized the company for partnering with a "radical environmental Web haven, EnviroLink." Faced with angry e-mails and unwilling to court controversy, Knauer says, Lycos simply decided to end its contract with EnviroLink.
"The issue here is a corporate partner that did not have the backbone to stand up and say that the Internet is a forum for the free exchange of ideas," he says.
Nonsense, says Lycos General Counsel Jeff Snider. "This is definitely not over the content of the site," he says. "It has nothing to do with censorship. There is a fundamental disagreement with respect to the intent of the contract."
Citing confidentiality, neither Snider nor Knauer would discuss the terms of the contract, except to say that the other party had violated them.
"As far as we're concerned, Lycos is in breach of this contract," Knauer says. "They are preventing us from meeting our obligations under this contract."
"That's ridiculous," Snider says. Lycos had good cause to end the contract, he said, declining to elaborate. "I'm trying real hard to take the high road here."
The two-year deal, announced May 14, called for EnviroLink to provide Lycos with content for the environment-related area of its site. At the time, Lycos President and CEO Bob Davis hailed the partnership as "another example of the commitment Lycos has made to promoting important issues like the environment."
Nonetheless, dissatisfaction with the deal was almost immediate, according to Snider. "We had issues from about a week after the contract was signed," he says. "It's purely coincidental" that Lycos canceled its agreement shortly after criticism of the partnership appeared online, he says.
The impetus for the criticism appears to have been an article in the August edition of Off-road.com, an online magazine for fans of motor sports. In a column titled, "Search Engine Giant Sides with Radical Environmental Web Haven - May Soon Find Itself Searching For Customers," Senior Editor Norm Lenhart criticizes some of the organizations whose sites are included on the EnviroLink network.
He cites Earth First, a self-described "radical environmental journal"; the Hunt Saboteurs Association, which suggests ways for environmentalists to disrupt hunting and fishing expeditions; and the Church of Euthanasia, which (satirically) recommends suicide to reduce human destruction of the planet. Lenhart then suggests that offended readers send e-mail messages to Lycos management.
Knauer says he does not agree with much of what is expressed on sites that EnviroLink hosts. "We don't really have an opinion on any environmental issues," he says.
But Lycos spokeswoman Madeleine Mooney told the online version of Wired magazine that some of the content on the EnviroLink network was not relevant. "If we have a link to a site that says, 'Save the Planet,' and some of the links are to sites that you wouldn't expect to see, we don't want to do that," she said. "We're talking about expectations of users. Relevancy is always a concern to us."
Relevancy is one of the most important attributes of a Web site, says Keane of Jupiter Communications - especially one, like Lycos, that makes money by helping its users find sites that interest them. "It's an ever-changing landscape," he says.
One of the most common strategies for making a site relevant is to "aggregate content," in 'Net speak: to gather as much information about as many subjects as possible, and to present it in an attractive fashion. But such a strategy can often result in confusing and even contradictory actions.
In February, for instance, Lycos bought Tripod for $58 million. Last week, it bought a company called WhoWhere for $133 million. Both companies allow users to create their own home pages, then integrate them into online "communities" of similar interests.
Before Lycos bought them, Tripod and WhoWhere were competitors. Now they are "partners."
Lenhart, in his vituperative essay on the Off-road.com magazine, expresses incredulity over Lycos' head-spinning partnerships. The company "has allied itself with a group who count amongst their goals, the elimination of the internal combustion engine," he notes, yet also sponsors a NASCAR motor race. "This is the height of hypocrisy," he writes.
Not quite, says Keane. Conflicts and mistakes are inevitable, especially in an unproved environment such as the World Wide Web. "A lot of these companies are just throwing a lot of darts on the board and hoping a few of them stick," he says.
Among them are Lycos and EnviroLink. According to Snider, Lycos is currently looking for a new partner to provide environmental news. EnviroLink is also searching for a new mate, Knauer says.
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