Q4 Warning Sends NetCreations Lower

NetCreations, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTCR) was down 9/16 at 5 7/16 Tuesday after lowering its revenue and bottom-line forecasts for the fourth quarter because of a weak online advertising market.

The New York-based company, which provides e-mail marketing services, said revenue for the quarter will be in the US$12 million to $14 million range, with a loss per share of 4 to 6 cents. Excluding one-time charges, per-share results will be between a 2-cent loss and breakeven, NetCreations said.

"NetCreations still faces many of the same challenges that the vast majority of Internet advertising and marketing companies experienced during the third quarter," said chairman and chief executive officer Rosalind Resnick.

"The marketplace continues to be a challenging one in which to operate, and, as such, our revenues and earnings to date have been adversely affected by the decline in marketing-related expenditures associated with our e-commerce companies and other dot-com customers," Resnick said.

Adding to the companies' woes, said Resnick, is the fact that the traditional pickup in spending as the holidays approach has not yet materialized.

"However," Resnick added, "we are pleased that our database continues to grow at an accelerated rate." NetCreations said its PostMasterDirect.com database is growing by more than 80,000 net new e-mail addresses a day, and has increased to more than 19.8 million addresses from 15.7 million at the end of the third quarter.

PostMasterDirect.com is an opt-in database that collects addresses from Internet users who have requested promotional information. NetCreations manages e-mail lists for more than 380 Web sites, including CNET, Uproar and About.com.

Earlier this month, NetCreations reported third-quarter net income of $576,347, or 4 cents per share, down from $1.3 million, or 11 cents, in the year-earlier quarter. Revenue rose 188 percent from a year earlier to $14.2 million. The company said at the time that it expected the industry wide slump in ad spending to continue to put pressure on results into next year.