Over a dish of scamorza e funghi in Rome’s San Saba neighbourhood last Friday, I met the new owners of Excite Europe, two young Italians who co-founded a Dublin-based online media company that recently listed on Euronext Paris’ alt-exchange.

Earlier in the month, the duo – Luca Ascani and Salvatore Esposito, the co-founders of GOADV – made their first purchase since going public this summer, buying Excite for €2.7 million (£1.9 million) cash, a dot-com that in the late 1990s had a valuation of several billion dollars.

The story of Excite is a cautionary tale of pomposity and reckless vision, but still fun to retell.

Its mantra, “Go big or stay home”, puzzled onlookers in the mid-1990s. In its early days, Excite blew through vast sums of Kleiner Perkins cash in a failed effort to catch Yahoo! as the predominant search engine. (By the time Google overtook Yahoo!, Excite was mired in bankruptcy proceeedings). After merging with the doomed broadband provider @Home in 1999, the company spent $780 million on what today would be a free ‘app’, the online greeting cards company Bluemountainarts.com.

In those early days, Excite was itself the subject of wild takeover talk. In one of the most bizarre buyout attempts of that period, Malcolm Glazer, then a little-known food-processing magnate, engineered an unconventional takeover bid for Excite in 1998. Mr Glazer faxed a $72-a-share offer to Excite’s offices. It was summarily rejected and Mr Glazer went about his way, solvent enough to buy Manchester United in May 2005 for $1.5 billion. And the price tag @Home paid for Excite.com in 1999, a year after the fax? A cool $6.7 billion.

Despite the best efforts of management, the brand’s appeal proved resiliently unsinkable. Throughout the Nasdaq de-listing, the layoffs, the boardroom scuffles and the bankruptcy proceedings, Excite.com was still getting healthy traffic. iWon.com, a portal that survived the crash, outbid rivals for the assets of Excite in bankruptcy court in late 2001, paying $10 million. It was a shortlived union. Excite.com was then bought by Ask.com, which was later bought by Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp, who now runs the portal quietly, never again dreaming of overtaking Yahoo! or Google.

And that’s just the story in the States.

In Europe, by virtue of Excite’s plan in the late 1990s to forge partnerships with local players, the owners included BT in Britain and Telecom Italia and Tiscali in Italy. The European assets were absorbed twice in the past three years, first by the Ask.com and later by the IAC acquisitions. This summer, Excite Europe’s long-time business development director, Bernhard Berger, helped execute a management buyout, prying the European domains, trademarks and assets from Mr Diller and securing the base of operations in Rome. Within a few weeks, Mr Ascani and Mr Esposito were at the door, ready to talk about a deal.

It is Excite Europe’s traffic, recognisable brand name, pan-European presence, and respectable bottom line (they expect earnings before interest and tax to be €300,000 (£210,000) on revenues of €3 million (£2.1 million) this year) that attracted Ascani and Esposito. With the merger, GOADV expects to double traffic to 12 million monthly unique visitors across the continent with local language web properties in eight countries – the UK, Ireland, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and eventually Poland.

While the ruin of Excite@Home came down to its wildly ambitious plan to provide both the content and the connectivity, the Ascani-Esposito’s plan is refreshingly simple – and much cheaper to implement. GOADV makes its money through search, creating websites based on the careful analysis of web search data.

So, for example, when the company saw earlier this year that an increasing number of French users were typing in search queries for swimming pools, they built a portal that covered all you need to know about buying a swimming pool. They did the same for bicycle enthusiasts in Germany and fans of Liverpool and AC Milan for the Champions League final in Athens this year.

“We know how to bring traffic to sites and convert traffic into sales,” Mr Esposito says. “That’s our know-how.”

It’s hard to quibble with the sense of the business plan. GOADV has partnerships delivering traffic to Yahoo!, eBay, eDreams and Expedia, to name a few. With the Excite Europe acquisition, it plans to funnel more traffic their way, plus continue to build its own customisable sites for consumers interested in personal finance, travel and shopping.

That’s it, I ask? “It’s enough”, they chime. They are planning more acquisitions, but the focus will stay the same: using search to drive sales.

Call it the “go small, stay in business” mantra of Excite 2007.

---

Bernhard Warner, formerly Reuters' internet correspondent in Europe and senior editor for The Industry Standard Europe, writes about technology, the internet and media industries. He can be reached at techscribe@gmail.com

Explore Tech & Web News

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming

Times recommends

• One gadget to rule them all
• The future of social networking: mobile phones
• Emo on the web: exploring a subculture