The Walt Disney Co. yesterday said that it was shutting down its Go.com portal, resulting in the layoffs of 400 workers. Effective March 20, the company said it would be converting all outstanding shares of Disney Internet Group common stock into shares of Disney common stock. The Walt Disney Internet Group will continue under its current management structure as a business segment of the Walt Disney Co.
The conversion is expected to result in the issuing of approximately 8.1 million new shares of Disney common stock.
A streamlined version of GO.com will continue to operate for a period of time in order to allow its transition. During this time it will also continue to operate and support the Infoseek search engine and associated traffic.
Some of GO.com’s more popular content and services will be migrated to other sites, such as: Astrology Zone by Susan Miller being moved to ABC.com.
According to Disney, it will continue to focus on its content Web sites and their related commerce businesses in order to further align it with its other media and entertainment businesses. The goal is “to take advantage of their considerable creative and technological strengths.”
The Walt Disney Internet Group is going to continue to operate Disney.com, DisneyAuctions.com, Disney Store.com, DisneyVacations.com, Family.com, ESPN.com, NFL.com, Soccernet.com, ABC.com, ABCNEWS.com, Mr. Showbiz, Movies.com and Wall of Sound.
After the conversion date, Disney common stock will be the only outstanding common stock of The Walt Disney Co. There are 2,086,258,193 shares of Disney common stock outstanding, and 158,509,549 additional shares of Disney common stock are issuable upon exercise of outstanding options.
