Miningco.com Files For IPO

Even as most Web stocks tumbled, Miningco.com on Wednesday joined the growing crowd of Internet start-ups hoping to go public in the first quarter of 1999.

The New York company filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to raise as much as $50 million in an initial public offering. Bear Stearns, the underwriter for recent IPOs Xoom.com (XMCM) and Theglobe.com (TGLO), is handling the deal, while San Francisco-based Volpe Brown Whelan is a co-manager.

Other well-known Web players to file for IPOs in recent weeks include iVillage and Priceline.com.

Miningco.com uses independent contractors as guides in charge of 600 different topically organized channels, which the company calls GuideSites. The guides complete a 16-week training process and are compensated with the greater of a minimum monthly fee or a percentage of revenue generated by all of the GuideSites.

For the nine months ended Sept. 30, the company lost $9.1 million on sales of $1.6 million, compared with a loss of $6.1 million and sales of $181,000 in the year-ago period. Ten percent of the company's revenue in 1998 came from barter ad agreements.

The company, founded by former MCI and Prodigy executive Scott Kurnit, used to go by the name The Mining Co. Kurnit owns 20 percent of the two-and-a-half-year-old company.

Written By Darren Chervitz