Marketing Pilgrim

LookSmart is expanding their paid search offerings to include contextual advertising. The press release says that they are now “the only company to offer publishers a comprehensive, private-labeled platform from which they can develop and grow direct relationships with advertisers, while maintaining any other ad network relationships.”

LookSmart’s advertising offerings now entail:

• search and contextual ad serving
• ad “backfill” capabilities
• high yield-focused ad serving algorithms
• Advertiser and Publisher APIs
• robust reporting.

The ad “backfill” capability “uses ad network feeds from other publishers to help increase revenue and bidding activity.”

The announcement comes just a couple weeks after Ask announced a contextual advertising product—LookSmart “licenses its AdCenter to top publishers, including Ask.com.”

LookSmart also recently released their Q1 numbers—$13.2M in revenue, up 25% over Q1 2006. How much do you think their new services will impact Q2—or will they have to wait before it affects them?

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