With the online market booming and Atlas three months removed from a redesign of its Web site, the time seems right.

Thus, it wasn't surprising when Hospodářské noviny reported Dec. 4 that Epic was considering selling Atlas to Mafra, the company behind Mladá fronta Dnes and iDnes.cz. Another Mafra competitor, Euro, chimed in Dec. 5, saying Atlas could sell for as much as 750 million Kč ($35.6 million).

Alois Mika, general manager of Epic, and Stanislav Holec, director of Mafra's multimedia division, deny reports of an impending sale, but leave open its eventual possibility.

"We have been talking to a number of people on an ongoing basis," Mika said. "Atlas has improved over the last number of months and is now on the right path. It comes down to what you think is the proper time to sell."

Atlas revised its search technology, began offering a Czech version of the ICQ messaging software and added support to send free SMS messages from Atlas to O2 mobile phones. Last year, the company posted its first operating profit.

Mafra's Internet business has stabilized and is now entering a period of expansion, Holec said.

"We are developing new technology by ourselves and also purchasing Web sites," he said. "But it's not true that we signed an agreement with Atlas. We've talked with many Web sites on the Czech market."

Mafra previously engaged Epic in talks about purchasing Atlas, Holec said.

The purchase would be a win for both companies, said Aleš Miklík, editor-in-chief of Lupa.cz, a site that tracks developments on the Czech Internet market. Atlas had 2.3 million visitors in October, while iDnes had 2 million, according to the research firm NetMonitor.

Frontiers between online roles are disappearing, he said. Google has a news site, Mafra is developing a free e-mail system, and Centrum.cz and Seznam.cz — traditional Atlas competitors — have news portals.

"Who is strictly a media company today?" Miklík said. "With its own service portal, Mafra would be able to compete with its rivals and acquire a large new audience for its advertisers."

Internet advertising has boomed for the past two years, Holec said. Mafra regularly runs out of room on its site for advertising requests from clients, many of the big businesses that advertise in Mafra's other properties — unlike the portals, which rely on advertising from small businesses.

Resting on these laurels isn't an option as the company prepares for the eventual expansion of broadband Internet here. As of July, 8.4 percent of the country had high-speed access, up 2 percent from the previous year.

"We will be prepared for the media revolution that is on the table," Holec said. The company is aggressively expanding Internet television capabilities, which Holec expects to become the backbone of future online media.

The possible sale of Atlas comes in the shadow of the growing strength of Google in the Czech Republic.

Google controls about 30 percent of the Czech search market, Miklík said, three years after launching Czech-language support. It doesn't release internal statistics, so its share of other services is difficult to estimate. It launched Google.cz in September.

In October, Google introduced support for electronic funds transfer (EFT) to its Czech advertising partners using its advertising system, AdSense. Sites hosting advertising with AdSense can have their share of advertising revenue routed directly to Czech bank accounts, rather than mailed as checks in U.S. dollars.

Miklík doesn't expect EFT to boost AdSense's popularity, if only because AdSense already dominates. Competitors include eTarget, adFox and Sklik; Centrum and Seznam run the latter two, respectively.

Google still has growth potential in the Czech market, especially since search portals have been slow to react to the challenges it poses, said Holec.