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Monday, July 30, 2007
Somewhat submerged in the news about Wikia acquiring Grub to move forward with an open-source-flavored search project to rival Google is the news that Google lost the contextual ad contract with Wikipedia powered sites to non-rival LookSmart, who now offers a contextual ad product.
Household name, publicly traded, with at least a few million dollars left to burn, and now with a toe in the door of a multibillion dollar business long chased by the top players. You might think: if a startup wanted a quick fast track towards further development of its upstart ad network, why not engineer a reverse takeover of LookSmart, change the name of the company, restructure, and let the good times roll? If nothing else, LOOK still has a sizeable database of advertisers. It probably has some handy buildings and lease agreements that figure to be underutilized unless someone figures something out soon.
Evidently, this kind of deal isn't imminent, as no one is making any suggestions of anything of the sort. Even with bubbling news, LOOK strains to trade 100,000 shares in a day. The company releases Q2 earnings later this week.Labels: contextual ads, looksmart, wikia
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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