LookSmart Loses Again

LookSmart Looks Dumb Again as they blame their lack of earnings on failure to tell their left hand what their right hand was doing. The linked story above shows a loss of $1.5 million on revenues of $16.5 million for the quarter. LookSmart has looked foolish a number of times in the past as they angered small business advertisers by changing their fee structure for PPC ads served while they were still partnered with MSN. But then MSN saw the writing on the wall and dumped LookSmart in favor of Overture PPC ads.

There was a short period where I was excited about LookSmart when they introduced the Grub distributed web crawling client that allowed everyone to participate in crawling the web from their own PC. I downloaded the software and within a week I had crawled over 50,000 web sites from my own PC and contributed results to the size of their index. I wrote an enthusiastic article in support the grub client, but after awhile, it seemed pointless as LookSmart didn't appear to be adding those results to their index. I still love the concept, but would rather see the results going to increase the size of say, the Nutch Open Source search database.

Looksmart has been on a downward spiral for a very long time and should consider calling it quits or openly seek buyout suitors before they go down in flames. Just one man's opinion. ;-)