<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" http-equiv=Content-Type> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2314.1000" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><B>Thursday November 16 7:24 PM ET</B><BR><FONT size=5><B>New Study Counts 130 Dot-Com Shutdowns This Year</B></FONT> <P> <P>PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - The dot-com death count for the year now stands at 130, according to a new study that says the rate of Internet companies going out of business is accelerating. <P>Webmergers, a San Francisco company which tracks mergers, acquisitions, and now shutdowns in the Internet space, said that of the 130 dot-coms that have shut down since January, 21 closed their doors in the first half of November alone. That compares with 22 that closed during all of October. <P>Some of the latest dot-com closures include the pet supply store <A href="http://pets.com/">Pets.com</A> (NasdaqNM:<A href="http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ipet&d=t">IPET</A> - <A href="http://biz.yahoo.com/n/i/ipet.html">news</A>), the furniture retailer <A href="http://furniture.com/">Furniture.com</A> , and the free Internet service provider 1stUp. <P>WebMergers President Tim Miller noted that the 130 closures are actually a small portion of the total number of Internet companies. ``If you think about it, there are probably about 10,000 Internet companies out there,'' he said. <P>But he acknowledged that many companies that did not make the death list, have been absorbed through mergers, often at bargain prices in deals where most or all of the employees were let go. <P>Miller said that more than 1,000 Internet companies have been acquired since 1998 and at least 700 have been acquired this year. ``Clearly, some of those were sold at distressed prices,'' he said. <P>The Webmergers report estimates some 8,000 jobs were lost due to companies shutting down. <P>Some 75 percent of the dot-com failures were consumer businesses, and 60 percent were e-commerce companies. <P>The largest number of closures -- 46 -- occurred in California, followed by New York, where there were 14 closures counted. </P></DIV></BODY></HTML>