Wikia Chooses LookSmart Ad Serving Platform for Management of Display and Text-Based Advertising

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Signaling a significant ramp in its ad sales business, Wikia Inc. (www.wikia.com), the leading provider of community resources for building and organizing free information on every topic, announced today it has licensed a white-label ad serving platform from LookSmart (NASDAQ:LOOK), an online advertising and technology company. Wikia will use the ad platform to grow and manage both display and text-based advertisers in its wide-ranging collection of communities. Breaking new ground for LookSmart, Wikia is the first implementation of the company’s ad technology for managing and serving display ad units which utilizes CPM-based pricing.

The LookSmart solution is comprised of a full-service ad serving and yield optimization platform and corresponding services to handle all forms of ad units and payment types (CPM, CPC and CPA). The platform and services will support Wikia’s sales of both CPC and CPM ads directly to their advertisers and will help Wikia optimize revenue and page yield among its various ad sources. Wikia will also become part of LookSmart’s distributed ad network, which provides relevant backfill for its partners to augment their own ad sales efforts. In addition, LookSmart will be providing search technology assets to Wikia.

“We did a lot of due diligence to find a flexible and intuitive ad serving technology that nets the highest revenue and yield,” said Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia. “We discovered in the process that LookSmart’s platform and services not only provide dynamic optimization of both our advertisers and backfill networks, but the white label aspect of it fits perfectly with our brand strategy.”

“Wikia is part of a growing trend of publishers using multiple networks combined with their own sales efforts to optimize page yield and revenues,” said Dave Hills, president and CEO of LookSmart. “This partnership demonstrates how explosive-growth companies like Wikia can execute on that vision with a totally white-labeled solution.”

A collection of freely-hosted, ad-supported Wiki communities, Wikia serves hundreds of millions of banners per month on an ever expanding list of topics, including entertainment, movies, sports, gaming and technology.

LookSmart licenses its ad technology to other top publishers, including Ask.com and Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, making it one of the more active technologies in online advertising today. First launched in Spring 2005, LookSmart's hosted advertising sales and service platform can allow search engines, media companies, social networking sites, retail sites, directories, ISPs and portals to manage their advertiser relationships and accounts.

About LookSmart

LookSmart is an online advertising and technology company that provides relevant solutions for advertisers, publishers and consumers. LookSmart is based in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit www.looksmart.com or call 415-348-7000.

About Wikia, Inc.

Since Wikia's launch in November 2004, more than 750,000 articles on 2,700 topics have been created and edited by over 100,000 registered users in 70 languages. In addition to working on open-source search, Wikia is currently home to topics ranging from sports at http://www.armchairgm.com to gaming at http://finalfantasy.wikia.com to entertainment at http://lost.wikia.com

Wikia enables groups to share information, news, stories, media and opinions that fall outside the scope of an encyclopedia. Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley launched Wikia in 2004 to provide community-based wikis inspired by the model of Wikipedia -- the free, open source encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales.

Wikia is committed to openness, inviting anyone to contribute web content. Authors retain their own copyrights and allow others to freely reuse their content under a variety of GNU and Creative Commons Licenses, allowing widespread distribution of knowledge and ideas.

Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements, such as references to growth in use of and demand for our products, customer acceptance of our products and our business prospects. These statements, including their underlying assumptions, are subject to risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. Results may differ due to various factors such as the possibility that we may be unable to gain or maintain customer acceptance of our publisher solutions or ad backfill products, that existing and potential customers for our products may opt to work with, or favor the products of, others due to more favorable products or pricing terms, limitations on or our inability to retain and grow our ad and customer base, and limitations on or our inability to enhance our products. In addition, you should read the risk factors detailed in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2007 and our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2006, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The statements presented in this press release speak only as of the date of the release. Also, please note that except as required by applicable law we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly update any forward-looking statements for any reason.

LookSmart is a registered trademark of LookSmart, Ltd.