German magazine and digital publisher Hubert Burda Media is buying Lycos iQ, a question-and-answer community site that will be one of the final Lycos Europe assets to be offloaded. Despite failing to innovate to retain its once-mighty search engine status, the portal with the black dog logo had, over the last couple of years, routinely hailed the site – an imitation of Yahoo’s popular Answers counterpart – as one of its best homegrown projects. It currently has 750,000 users, but the UK version has gone off-line.
A separate company from its US counterpart, Lycos Europe was unable to find a buyer last year so in December decided to liquidate instead. In asset-stripping, it’s managed to off-load its Jubii Denmark, United Domains and Shopping businesses, and even struck a deal to rescue Tripod from closure just days before a shutdown deadline. Next in the fire sale before the dog is put to sleep – the Pangora ecommerce network. Burda has extensive online operations under its Burda Digital Ventures wing, but the company, via Deutsche-Startups.de, says it wants to offer its mag editors’ knowledge to readers through Q&A. No price was disclosed.