But they were initially put off by the price the company wanted. Yossi Vardi, the Mirabilis chairman, said the company had been in discussions with a number of suitors since last August. With a few million dollars in backing from local investors, it has built one of the most popular services on the Internet. Mirabilis was founded two years ago by four Israelis in their early 20's. (Unlike ICQ, Hotmail had started to sell advertisements.)
#Send icq online free#
Most notably, Microsoft paid a reported $400 million for Hotmail, which offers free E-mail services. That has not stopped other companies from buying similar services. As a result, chat services that do take ads receive the lowest rates of any type of Internet service. Moreover, advertisers worry that their advertisements will be associated with content that they do not control and may be embarrassing. ''When you chat, you look at what you are writing, not what other people are writing,'' he said. ''E-mail, chat and instant messaging are not good advertising platforms,'' said Bo Peabody, the chief executive of Tripod, an on-line community service recently bought by Lycos. But there is some skepticism that chat services, no matter how popular, will turn into big money makers. The company's shares rose $1.50 yesterday, to $84.75. Many Internet stock analysts praised the deal as an inexpensive way for America Online to increase its customer relationships. Moreover, he said, ICQ users spend an average of 75 minutes a day on the service, compared with fewer than 10 minutes a day for highly touted search and directory services such as Yahoo and Lycos. With no promotion other than word of mouth, it has already achieved something of a cult status, growing at more than 50,000 subscribers a day. Mirabilis is highly regarded among savvy Internet users for its chat service, known as ICQ (shorthand for ''I seek you''), which enables them to detect when fellow users are on line and to communicate instantly with them. Pittman helped start, took in only $500,000 in revenue its first year. He compared the Internet today to the early days of cable television. ''When you talk about making money on the Internet, no one is doing more than America Online,'' said Robert W. Ultimately, America Online hopes to put advertising on the chat service and sell its members products and services. What the company, an Israeli concern called Mirabilis Ltd., does have is users, 12 million of them who spend an average of more than an hour a day on its Internet chat service. But in what may be a record of financial weightlessness, America Online said yesterday that it would pay at least $287 million for a company that has never taken in a penny in revenue and has no plans to start charging money. With all the frenzy over the Internet, entrepreneurs have been able to create and sell companies for huge sums without ever earning a dime.