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TJ
See Alexa for past 2 years. Looks terrible.
[alexa.com...]
That's all?
?!
Ignore Alexa stats - next to useless.
I believe LookSmart had quite a decent directory with Zeal, but I don't believe the internet is heading in that direction anymore. So, personally, and this is only my guess as I have no better a crystal ball than you do, I think LS are history.
TJ
But that change (early this year) is not the whole of it. LookSmart's troubles (at least from the perspective of its clients!) began last spring. On April 2,2003 LookSmart clients were surprised and angered with an email notice about a change in LS's business model. Those who had paid "one-time" fees to be reviewed for inclusion, were notified that the company was changing to a pay-per-click arrangement, and would have to pay monthly to maintain their listing. To soften things, they did credit prior customers with "free clicks" --$15 per month for 20 months (at 15¢ per click)--but there was still a lot of anger.
(Yahoo! had made a similar change (from one-time fees to annual fees) some months earlier, but was wise enough to grandfather those who had entered under the old terms.)
MSN still uses them.
Well, yes. . . . I guess we should say, "is in the process of dumping them"! since MSN is making its changes over a period of time. But they made it clear (in January, I think?) that they were making the break.
Are there any new deals going on with LookSmart and other players, any insider info?
Their only hope of survival is to rebuild Wisenut and make themselves into a proper search engine, but that looks extremely unlikely.
I don't understand how can someone with such potential go down... slowly and like that. Can't they bring it up? Won't they try harder? Strange....
When I called them about the discrepency they wanted to see my cards before they showed me theirs, which I thought was curious. So fine, whatever, I sent them a copy of my server logs for the range specified and a screen shot from iwebtrack, but in both cases I blocked out the IP addresses. About a week later they come back reporting their numbers were accurate and sent me some amateur Excel job showing 4,000 clicks. I said I wanted to see IP addresses so I could compare them to my data and make sure I wasn't being billed for repeat clicks (even though I knew I wasn't, since those clicks would also have shown up in my logs) and they refused, saying it was confidential information, blah blah blah.
To make a long story short, I charged back the $5,000 or so they billed to my Amex for that time period. I sent them one final e-mail telling them why I was doing this and that I had forwarded all of the supporting documentation and our conversations to American Express and that the final decision would of course be theirs (Amex's).
I never heard back from Looksmart after I sent that message. The charge-back went through and they never disputed it with Amex.
I know of at least one other person who had the same problem with them. He's actually the only other person I knew who used them.
[edited by: seth_wilde at 3:06 pm (utc) on April 21, 2004]
What sort of results are people getting from Loooksmart at the moment?
Did you not read the message right above where you posted? That's the kind of results people are getting with Looksmart.
What sort of results are people getting from Loooksmart at the moment?
Maybe he meant people who aren't webmasters.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld, The_ronster.
