LookSmart Selects blinkx.com
SAN FRANCISCO - LookSmart, an online advertising and technology company, signed a strategic agreement with blinkx.com, a video search engine, to power video search results on LookSmart's largest consumer site, findarticles.com. FindArticles is part of LookSmart's proprietary network of sites that delivered 17.6 million uniques in November 2006; the network has grown almost fourfold in two years.
FindArticles' video content will include news clips, short documentaries, TV content, movies, and other appropriate video served to the consumer based on their search terms. The site will offer categorically relevant videos under its Arts & Entertainment and Business & Finance sections first, moving to other categories throughout the spring and early summer.
The additional video content is designed to increase visitor frequency and time spent with FindArticles. In addition to growing the audience, the video enhancements will provide new opportunities for advertisers.
"After looking at many options for a video partner who could help grow FindArticles' audience, blinkx's content, publisher relationships and technology made them a hands-down winner," said Dave Hills, president and chief executive officer of LookSmart. "We look forward to this first phase of a growing relationship with the blinkx team."
The video content will augment the more than 11 million articles from 3,000 sources on FindArticles.
blinkx's search engine crawls the Web for audio/video content derived from more than 100 content and media companies. blinkx uses visual analysis and speech recognition to better understand rich media content for a set of video content results for consumers.