New Looksmart Bidsmart Advertising Pros Cons

looksmart lunches bidsmart featured listings

[Birney]

Looksmart yesterday (?) launched their new Looksmart bidsmart featured listings. As far as I can make out it appears that it costs advertisers £60 to begin using (£50 goes towards the bidding process). This appears very strange to me as Looksmart is the smallest (by far) of all the major Pay Per Click programs out there (Google, Espotting, Overture, etc) - yet seems to be charging its advertisers a very high start up fee (on google its only £5)! Has anyone used bidsmart?

Listings are bidded on as usual with the highest bidder appearing at the top of results. I think this means the first 3 positions of the page (where overture previously was) - however it could mean results appear directly under the 'Selected Sites from LookSmart' part. Either way its bad for the consumer - the sites paying the most in advertising appear highest and therefore will probably pass this on to the customer.

This system is also a shame for those companies who've paid £175 to get listed in the directory. Directory listings are given second priority to bidsmart advertisers.

Finally, I think that having sponsored listings (hidden or unhidden) kind of defeats the purpose of having directories. Directories are meant to be good as only suitable sites providing high quality content are listed. Having Bidsmart defeats the purpose - looksmart will be listing in the highest positions websites that are paying the most money to be there - actual quality of the sites and content (in practice) will be ignored.

Its a shame they couldn't have lowered the directory submission price (backing it up by using an affiliate scheme perhaps?) - looksmart had been producing SOME ok results for freeserve, btopenworld, bthome and tiscali. Now results will be less relevant. I'm hoping that these portals switch to using the main google index soon. Using the main google index WITH its adwords - this would hopefully allow them to generate some income without having a negative impact on results.

[edited by: Birney at 1:52 pm (utc) on June 20, 2002]

[IanTurner]

Looksmart UK Syndicated sites already use Google backfill on LS directory.

[webdiversity]

Nobody will be getting any results from Bidsmart yet as the editorial review is 3-5 days.

I signed up for an account and it was a cinch to do, nice interface and because it's new you can pick up traffic that may be costing £2 plus on Overture and espotting for 5p because there are so few advertisers.

if you want to buy some traffic get in early, fill your boots and then as the bidding goes up move to other keywords at 5p. For the early adopters there may be some value.

I must admit they have been deliberately vague with where the PPC results are going to be shown. They have also been very quiet in saying if this product will replace the directory submission at £149 plus VAT, if it is then they did one of the fastest about turns.

Do you think they learnt too much from the Small Biz debacle and made this such a low key launch on purpose ?

[Receptional]

We had many bids up at point of launch, so if Looksmart get round to giving us our password we'd be able to see if it is getting traffic. However, I know that they have put considerable resources into this project. Here is what I have gleaned so far:

1) The directory listings are not affected. Where I was number 1 in the directory, I remain number one inspite of the bid still being there (so I am there twice)
2) The top results alraedy appear to be syndicated onto: NTLWORLD, Tesco.net, and looksmart.co.uk (obviously) but I understand that they have got (and are persuing) further deals.

I think they will be a big player in PPC in the UK and this - if it works - may well replace their US mess. They only need to sign a deal with MSN (with whom they have big ties) and the ppc market would be blasted open...

Dixon.