Little Known LookSmart Surges Ahead of WebCrawler, HotBot, Snap! and Mining Company in Relevant Knowledge Rankings
Business Wire - August 10, 1998 17:09
%LOOKSMART %CALIFORNIA %COMPUTERS %ELECTRONICS %COMED %TELECOMMUNICATIONS %INTERACTIVE %MULTIMEDIA %INTERNET %PRODUCT V%BW P%BW
SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 10, 1998--
Heir-Apparent to Listed Portal Companies Attributes Rise to Strong Female Audience and ISP Partnerships
LookSmart, the "quiet achiever" of the portal space, has surged past popular names like WebCrawler, HotBot, Snap!, and the Mining Company in the latest Relevant Knowledge(TM) rankings for July.
LookSmart broke into the top 20 at No. 18 with reach of nearly 4.5 million unique visitors in July.
This compares with the reach of industry veterans HotBot, WebCrawler (No. 23 - 4.0 million) and is more than the reach of three high profile recent entrants combined -- Snap!, GoTo.com and Planet Direct -- who total 4.0 million unique users. Industry leaders with billion dollar market capitalizations like Lycos.com have roughly double LookSmart's reach (No. 9 - 10.7 million).
LookSmart CEO Evan Thornley attributed the rise to LookSmart's audience focus: "We set out to meet the needs of the mainstream audience that represents the future of the Web, not its past. As a consequence LookSmart's audience skews strongly towards new users, women and families -- the emerging mass market for online media.
"By uniquely meeting these user's needs for simple, high quality navigation, LookSmart has grown rapidly without any marketing or branding expenditure from outside the top 100 to inside the top 20 in six months. In particular, LookSmart has a higher proportion of women in its audience than any other search engine."
Forrester Research recently projected that 55 percent of new users in the coming year will be women.
In addition, LookSmart continues to lead the market for ISP content solutions, recently adding Flash.net, Slip.Net and Micro-Net to its stable of 95 ISP partners who have adopted a tailored LookSmart product as their home page.
"Our approach of working cooperatively with ISPs to provide quality content and search solutions appears to be driving considerably more traffic than the high profile, low volume deals of other companies in this space," said Thornley.
About LookSmart
LookSmart Limited, a privately held Internet publishing company providing category-based navigation services on the World Wide Web, hosts the world's largest editorially reviewed database of web content with 500,000 site listings in 20,000 categories. LookSmart's unique cascading menu interface provides users with fast, intuitive access to a wealth of highly relevant online content, and provides advertisers with targeted media opportunities within a higher quality editorial environment.
Current LookSmart partners include AltaVista, @Home, Compuserve, Netscape, Microsoft, Bigfoot, Desktop News, HotBot, Erols, and over 95 ISPs. LookSmart incorporates a unique "syndicated distribution" strategy, allowing partners to co-brand with LookSmart's product or seamlessly blend its content into an existing interface based on its flexible technology architecture. Investors include Cox Enterprises, the Reader's Digest Association and the Walden International Investment Group. LookSmart's competitors include Yahoo! (YHOO), Excite (XCIT), Lycos (LCOS), InfoSeek (SEEK), CNet's (CNWK) Snap! and CMG's (CMG) Planet Direct.
The company is headquartered at 487 Bryant Street, San Francisco, California, 94107. LookSmart is the premier provider of navigation services for Netscape in the U.S., Australia and the U.K. LookSmart can be reached by phone at 415/597-4850 or experienced at www.LookSmart.com.
CONTACT: LookSmart
Liz Connaghan, 415/597-8514
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