Lookinsmart2002 explains it a whole lot better than I, in this...

Lookinsmart2002 explains it a whole lot better than I, in this post today, on Yahoo ....

New revenue stream
by: lookinsmart2002 07/06/05 10:22 pm
Msg: 141918 of 141934

Looks business model used to rely for revenue primarily on 2 things:

1. Charging customers to be included in it's listings

2. Licensing the directory.

But that is where it stopped. When a user clicked on a search listing, the paid click then generated revenue as the user left LOOK's site or the partner site.

They continually needed to be concerned with attracting distribution partners and advertisers. They proved themselves good at attracting advertisers but not that good at attracting distribution partners IMO.

However they now have a powerful new revenue stream emerging IMO, which takes away a dependcy on distribution partners, and reduces depency on advertisers:

10 million FindArticles content pages on the web surrounded by contextual ads.

At the moment, they use Google for the contextual ads. But in time I am of the opinion they will roll out their own ads with Google backfill.

But this would be very different to Google's contextual model. Google places contextual ads on OTHER PEOPLES pages.

However LOOK's FA pages are branded with FindArticles, Furl and other look links. Every time somebody comes across a FA page, they are exposed to LOOK's advertising of it's own integrated services, plus revenue generating contextual ads.

That is like having 10 million ads for Furl out there, or 10 million ads for their verticals etc.

But the beauty of the model is how it is self feeding. Users arrive at FA pages ether via Find Articles search, 3rd party search engines or via Furl listings. The former and the latter methods provide LOOK with highly useful conextual information about those pages - Furl provides user tag info, FA search provides the search terms used.

This will enable LOOK over time to place far more relevant contextual ads on these pages, offering far better ROI than Google contextual advertising.

And even better, while they wait for the advertisers to line up (which they will if the ROI is there), they can backfill with Google ads on ten million pages, and get paid by Google!

Google provides them with traffic, then pays them to display ads.

And IMO 10 million articles is the tip of the iceberg - libraries all over the world are digitising historical printed documents of interest. LOOK is already one of the biggest (if not the biggest) online provider of digitized content - and is in a good position to attract a lot more content.

Not only will LOOK have control of a large number of propietary content pages, they will have information about how those pages are searched for, and how users categorise them. That is a huge advantage over Google.

That is why this stock has potential IMO.

Cheers

Lookin

Ooops I think I got LC excited.... ;o)

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YES ..... I AM excited !!!

:)
LC