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| Name | Failure of the Go Network: A Two Billion Dollar Mistake |
| Video Uploader | Video From Midway to Main Street |
| Upload Date | This Video Uploaded At 01-11-2017 19:11:33 |
| Video Discription | Sometimes ideas go well. Sometimes ideas don’t go so well, but have a happy ending anyway. And sometimes, well sometimes ideas just fail. Such was the case with Disney’s attempt at establishing dominance in the budding world of the internet with Go.com. What was Go.com and why did it fail? New here? Be sure to subscribe! 🔷https://goo.gl/x17zTL My Patreon! ❤https://patreon.com/RobPlays My Disney Podcast! 🎧http://ttapodcast.com Follow me on Twitter! 📱http://www.Twitter.com/RobPlays Disney saw that the internet was no longer some novelty, but a real potential industry in the making. The big thing at the time were specifically web portals. CEO Michael Eisner was set on Disney creating their own portal from scratch. After all, it was a mindset that had benefited Disney in the past. However not everyone was as confident. By this point portals like AOL and Yahoo! had already established a foothold on the internet, and some felt that the best path forward would be for Disney to outright acquire one of them. VP of Strategic Planning and eventual CFO Tom Staggs suggested that Disney spend $180 million for a 10%-15% stake in Yahoo! with hopes they’d be able to work together on a portal. There was even suggestions that Disney buy AOL as it was growing in popularity. Eisner rejected the idea and told Staggs to “Go back to the drawing board and come up with a plan to do this ourselves.” In 1997 Disney purchased a one-third stake in the web design and management company Starwave for a reported $100 million. That following January in 1998 Disney made their move by registering go.com. A few months later in April they exercised rights they had to buy out the remaining shares of Starwave, taking complete ownership of the company and totaling the money spent to get there to $350 million. Two months later they purchased 43% of Infoseek, the third most popular search engine at the time, for $70 million and Starwave. That next summer Disney announced that Infoseek would merge with Disney’s own internet holdings into a new company called Go.com. Disney would own 72% while Infoseek shareholders would own the remaining 28%. Within hours of the news of the deal, Infoseek shares dropped 10%. Investors were worried by the fact that the stock in the deal wasn’t Disney stock, but a tracking stock. Tracking stocks are shares that reflect the performance of a subsidiary company rather than a parent company. So in other words, if Go.com failed but the entire rest of the Disney company did well, the Go.com shareholders would still be out of luck. In the end, through the confusing deal and all, Disney had Go.com as their own internet portal to lead them into the future. In just as many years it took to put together though, it all fell apart. Why? Where do I even begin? Disney convinced ABC president Steve Bornstein to run Go.com and very quickly he realized what a mess things were. None of the Disney sites shared a coherent purpose or design, and it turned out that the different company cultures of Starwave and Infoseek made working together quite difficult. In early 2000 things continued to go wrong for Go.com when they were forced by a judge to drop their original logo. It was found to be too similar to the logo for Goto.com, a search engine that existed before Go. Disney had to pay $21.5 million in damages to Goto.com and rebrand their portal, which according to Disney was the result of a $40 million marketing effort. Ultimately, for all of the talent and history behind Disney as an entertainment business, they were still a traditional media company trying to keep up with the new lighting-fast speed of the internet. So in February of 2000 Bornstein held a meeting with Disney leadership to put it plainly: Disney could not compete and the Go.com web portal was a failure. It would take a full extra year, but on January 29th, 2001, Disney would finally announce that they were shutting down Go.com and laying off over 400 employees. Despite the announcement, Disney actually didn’t shut down Go.com right away. It wouldn’t be until 2013 that they would finally retire the Go.com logo and replace the website with a Disney-branded landing page that’s still there now. Today you might still notice that some websites are hosted on the go.com domain, but at this point Disney does nothing to brand it that way. Go.com was a costly failure for The Walt Disney Company. By the time the dust settled the venture cost Disney just over two billion dollars in losses and they didn’t have much to show for it. It was no doubt a humbling experience., Go.com just proves that no company is immune from failure once in awhile. |
| Category | Travel & Events |
| Tags | go network | go network disney | go network programming | starfire | go.com | go.com wiki | infoseek | disney mistakes | what happened to go.com? | what happened to the go network? | failure of the go network | why go.com failed | why the go network failed | why did disney's go.com fail? | why did disney's go network fail? | what happened to infoseek? | disney go.com history | disney go network history | go.com disney history | go network disney history | rob plays | robplays |
