LookSmart Annual Shareholder Letter

SAN FRANCISCO, May 19, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Dear Shareholders:

The year 2013 was a busy year for LookSmart, Ltd.   Throughout the year, we focused on three priorities: instituting ownership thinking, rationalizing the cost structure of the business, and creating new business opportunities.   At the same time, we  lowered our losses, from $8.0 million to $5.0 million. This process continues in 2014 and we hope to make even more progress this year.

Our Company's policy is to never give quarterly or annual guidance because we believe it is a disservice to long-term shareholders.  While we do not give guidance, our goal is to be a profitable and sustainable business as soon as possible.

In 2013,  we acquired two assets at opportunistic prices.  These assets significantly expand LookSmart's products and services. 

1. Data Center:  We bought a data center that we now own and operate.  We purchased the data center because:
   1. It promised to save the Company almost $600 thousand in annual hosting expenses.
   2. It has given us extra capacity to pursue new businesses in hosting and cloud computing.
2. Social Media: We acquired the assets of Syncapse, that included the assets of the former Clickable.com, in September 2013.  After spending time and money developing the products latent in these assets, we are rebranding all of the products as Clickable.   We bought the assets because:
   1. They allowed us to quickly create a customized marketing ROI attribution dashboard platform for CMOs and marketers.
   2. They allowed us to quickly create an enterprise social media marketing and search marketing platform that solves the challenges of big brand marketers.
   3. We acquired a strong team that can optimize marketers' return-on-ad spend on Google, Bing and Facebook ads.

Our Clickable Marketing ROI dashboards combine social and search data with proprietary analytics for networks such as: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Youtube, Tumblr, Google Adwords, Google Analytics, Google DFP, Bing Adcenter, Sina Weibo, RenRen, vKontakte, Vimeo, Mixi, Mxit, Naver, YouKu, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Tumblr, as well as your CRM, email, and marketing funnel tools.

At Clickable, we have products that solve the search engine marketing and social media needs of organizations of any size, from small and medium-sized businesses to large Fortune 100 companies.  We have recently signed up a few global Fortune 100 brands as customers.  We invite you to contact our solutions team to try out the products and services for your own company or brand.

LookSmart enters 2014 with products and services in the major channels such as Google, Facebook, Bing.  We have also expanded our ad network's  capabilities. In addition to search-intent traffic, we can now deliver traffic from display, video, mobile, remarketing and email channels.

As major long-term shareholders, LookSmart management has its incentives aligned with all shareholders.  Management believes in its obligation to operate with the capital allocation discipline of an Intelligent Investor and the management discipline of using lean startup and "growth hacking" methods in running its business.

Lastly, I would like to thank all our shareholders, customers and our associates (employees) who have helped make 2013 a year of change and opportunity for LookSmart and look forward to a challenging and successful 2014.

If you would like to see how our marketing ROI dashboards can help your business or how our managed ad services can improve your return on ad spend on Google, Bing, Facebook and other social networks, please fill out the form at Clickable.com and see your social media assets come alive with our marketing ROI dashboard.

If you are an agency or marketer looking to buy traffic from display, video, email, and search intent channels, please contact us to improve your search marketing ROI.

For your next conference, our visual command center can increase social conversations around your hash tags. Contact us to get your live visual command center.

About LookSmart, Ltd.
LookSmart is a pioneer in online advertising. Founded in 1997, LookSmart has been connecting advertisers and agencies to high quality sources of inventory for performance marketing, and helps online publishers monetize their inventory through our award winning Ad Center platform. LookSmart's highly scalable technology processes billions of search queries on a daily basis, enabling marketers to bid in real-time across search and display inventory, and leverage intent data to get performance that meets aggressive campaign goals. LookSmart also operates Clickable.com, a technology-enabled solutions company that uses social media data to help some of the world's most valuable brands understand their customer needs and improve performance,as well as providing a technology-enabled services company that helps companies and agencies manage their online marketing for themselves and their clients. LookSmart is based in San Francisco, California. For more information, visit www.looksmart.net, www.clickable.com, or call (415) 348-7000.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that are subject to factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the results contemplated by the forward-looking statements, including assumptions that may or may not be correct or accurate due to the inherent uncertainty of future events, the actions of third parties we cannot control or predict with certainty, and other factors that may cause us to change our plans.

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SOURCE LookSmart, Ltd.