AltaVista Selects GoTo as Exclusive Pay-For-Performance Search Provider
PASADENA & PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 16, 2000 -- GoTo.com, Inc. (Nasdaq:GOTO), the leading provider of Pay-For-Performance search, comparison shopping and auction services to Web sites across the Internet, and AltaVista Company (www.altavista.com), the leading search and information marketplace for consumers and businesses, and a majority-owned operating company of CMGI, Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI), today announced an 18-month search distribution and advertising referral agreement. GoTo will become the exclusive Pay-For-Performance search provider to AltaVista's millions of users.
Under the agreement, GoTo will provide AltaVista's search service users with GoTo Premium Listings on select search results pages of AltaVista beginning in November. GoTo Premium Listings is GoTo's keyword search service for portals and includes the top Pay-For-Performance search results submitted by GoTo's growing base of approximately 32,000 advertisers.
"We believe this relationship brings not only another form of relevant results to our users, but a valuable search offering that represents a meaningful revenue opportunity for AltaVista," said Jeff Housenbold, vice president and general manager, Web & Enterprise Products & Marketing, AltaVista Company.
GoTo distributes its search products, such as GoTo Premium Listings, across an extensive network of tens of thousands of Web sites, which will now include AltaVista. GoTo's unique model provides both a high return on investment for its advertisers who bid for placement of these listings within its search results and an enhanced set of results for consumers.
"We are delighted to align with AltaVista under exclusive terms," said Harry Chandler, executive vice president, GoTo. "This relationship represents continuing validation for our core strategy of distributing our search results through our rapidly expanding network, which is the largest Pay-For-Performance network on the Internet. We also believe our advertisers will benefit from the additional quality and volume of the traffic to their Web sites from AltaVista."
About AltaVista
AltaVista Company is the leading search service and information marketplace at http://www.altavista.com. Building on its strong search heritage and patented technology, AltaVista software and services are used to unlock the full potential of the Internet for web users and to turn unstructured data into valuable information for businesses. AltaVista performs more than 50 million web search queries on average per day throughout the world.
AltaVista offers users informative services including AltaVista Search (http://www.altavista.com), Raging Search (http://www.raging.com), AltaVista Shopping.com, and vertical search centers. AltaVista also licenses its patented search technology and powers more than 1,000 of the world's leading e-commerce firms, portals and enterprises. Headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., AltaVista is a majority-owned operating company of CMGI Inc. (Nasdaq:CMGI).
About GoTo
GoTo (Nasdaq:GOTO) makes introductions between the customers of its Web site partners and the best businesses, products and services on the Internet. GoTo provides a set of e-commerce services to Web site partners, such as Web site search, comparison shopping, and auction search. In addition to consumer-focused offerings, GoTo offers directory search and auction services for business portals. GoTo reaches millions of Internet users through its tens of thousands of affiliate partners, which include America Online, Terra Lycos, AltaVista, CompuServe, EarthLink/MindSpring, Microsoft, Netscape and InfoSpace/Go2Net. GoTo has relationships with approximately 32,000 active, paying advertisers, who place their product, service and information offerings through each of GoTo's services. During the third quarter of 2000, GoTo completed approximately 114 million paid introductions, each of which represents the successful match of a user need with an advertiser offering. GoTo is headquartered in Pasadena, California and a showcase site of its services can be found online at www.GoTo.com.
Certain statements, including, without limitation, statements related to financial and operating performance and agreements with distribution affiliates in this news release constitute "forward-looking statements." These forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements due to risks such as: the risk that the transaction will not yield economic benefits to GoTo. For a discussion of some of the other risk factors that could affect GoTo's future results, see the discussion of "Risks That Could Affect Our Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in GoTo's September 30, 2000 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
This release contains forward-looking statements which address a variety of subjects including, for example, the expected benefits of the agreement between AltaVista and GoTo and the expected interoperability of the technologies and products of AltaVista with those of GoTo. The following important factors and uncertainties, among others, could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements: AltaVista depends on third-party technologies which may not successfully interoperate with the technologies and products of AltaVista or other third parties; AltaVista may experience difficulties integrating technologies, operations and personnel of recent acquisitions, AltaVista's growth depends upon continued and increased demand for and market acceptance of AltaVista's web sites; and increased competition and technological changes in the markets in which AltaVista competes. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to CMGI's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including CMGI's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the most recently ended fiscal year.
GoTo.com, Pay-For-Performance and GoTo are all trademarks of GoTo.com, Inc. AltaVista is registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.