Portal Excited by good figures

Web portal Excite has posted encouraging year-end results after it announced that its turnover for 1998 topped $154.1 million, with a net loss of $6.7 million. In it's fourth quarter alone the company reported turnover of $54.1 million -- up 163 per cent on the same time last year. CEO George Bell said he was pleased with the strong results. In particular he said improved cash flow and increased patronage of its Web site -- up to 70 million page views per day in mid January, he claimed -- all helped to contribute to Excite's performance. He said a campaign to drive more users to Excite's Web site during the last quarter had proved successful helping the increase the number of user registrations by more than half. Earlier this week it was announced that @Home, the high speed US Internet service provider, had agreed to buy Excite for $6.7 billion. ®