• by Masha Geller , August 20, 2001

After I got criticized for not talking about the demise of the Industry Standard last week, I'm sure some readers would criticize me for not talking about Engage, so here it goes.

By now, I think everyone knows that the ad network is trying to sell off its media business and is cutting staff. So what's there to talk about? Is anyone surprised? Was this unexpected? Shocking? No, not after their parent company CMGI decided not to renew a $50 million loan two weeks ago.

The main reason I didn't want to talk about it is because I've done too many exit interviews in the past few months and I always get either "we'll be back stronger than ever," as I did from Dee Cravens, President of dearly departed AdForce (a CMGI subsidiary); or sour grapes like "the market crashed and we didn't have any money left having spent $15 million renovating our building and not building our business."

Was the loss of funding really that unexpected? After CMGI closed AdForce, Engage's ad serving sister company, it was only a matter of time.

As you may remember, CMGI went of a feeding frenzy about a year and a half ago and bought 4 companies- adKnowledge, Accipiter, Flycast (all now part of Engage - the part to be sold), and AdForce - to combine them into a force strong enough to compete with DoubleClick for ad serving world dominance. Unfortunately, it didn't quite happen that way. If to believe AdForce's Cravens, CMGI never had the wherewithal to integrate the companies.

For the sake of the employees still left at Engage who have been put on layoff alert, and for the sake of healthy competition for DoubleClick, I hope a buyer is found soon.

On the other hand, many wise experts predicted survival of only the fittest ad companies (and only the fittest can carry us out of this mess we're in), so maybe this is for the best.

There. I talked about it.