Lycos and Tripod in three-legged race to attract advertisers

£7.5 million invested in Web communities

Advertisers and electronic retailers will be able to pitch their wares to specifically targeted Net audiences in the UK following a deal between Lycos Bertelsmann and Tripod. The tie-up is intended to attract a bigger share of the advertising spend on the net by offering companies "guaranteed 100 per cent accurate targeting for their online promotions". If the success of Tripod in the US (where three million people have already built their own home pages since 1992) is mirrored here in the UK, thousands of people could soon be living in cybercommunities (or 'Pods'). By offering business and home users the opportunity to build Web sites for free without the need for any HTML skills, Tripod and Lycos hope to attract enough people to make this particular UK cyber community just as appealing to advertisers. Lycos Bertelsmann -- a joint venture between Lycos and Europe's largest media company -- believes this is the way forward which is why it has invested £7.5 million in improving existing infrastructures to manage the predicted demand for Tripod. According to the latest research, Lycos and Tripod may be on the right track. In the last six months more than a million people in the UK have become web users. And of the seven million adults who use the web in the UK, a quarter of them have bought goods and services online. ®