Brian McCullough

“Perhaps the most incredible deal of the time was Excite@Home’s acquisition of Blue Mountain Arts for $740 million dollars in cash and stock. Excite@Home was a company formed when the broadband ISP @Home merged with the search portal Excite.com. Blue Mountain Arts operated the website Bluemountain.com, where users could send each other electronic greeting cards by email. That’s right. Bluemountain did nothing but send Grandma electronic “get-well-soon” greetings. But Bluemountain.com was getting 9 million unique users a month to do this, and at the time, traffic was the sine qua non for a Yahoo-chasing portal player like the Excite half of Excite@Home.50 As the New York Times noted in its article announcing the deal, Excite@Home “predicted that the acquisition would increase its audience by 40%, to encompass approximately 34% of Internet traffic.”51 So, Excite@Home was willing to pay $82 per user to attract additional eyeballs to its network of properties and try to keep pace in the portal race.”
― Brian McCullough, How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone