LOOKSMART WARNING -- URGENT

For all of those who have accounts on LookSmart, we would like to post this warning. We are looking into what seem to be billing problems on at least one of our listings. If the evidence warrants, we will be taking a close look at every other account we have, and taking action.

At this time, it appears that we have been charged on LookSmart for click-throughs that never occurred. We are in the process of documenting and verifying this problem. We have redundant, independent hit tracking on our websites, so we have 2 independent tracking sources. LookSmart claims 427 visitors, while our hit tracking shows a grand total of 80 unique visitors and 121 page views. It's not like the numbers are even remotely close.

I was tipped off to a potential problem when I realized that our LookSmart listing had appeared and then disappeared almost immediately (within the span of a few days). This is a brand new website, only in existence for about 2 weeks, for an industry that does NOT get stellar internet traffic. I looked into the account, and was astonished to see that they claimed 584 total clicks, 427 of which were billable. Quite bluntly, this seemed impossible, so I went into our other hit trackers to confirm.

We are documenting this situation as I write this post, and will be contacting LookSmart. We will also be looking into our other large LookSmart accounts.

WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT ALL SMALL BUSINESS ADVERTISERS ON LOOKSMART DO THE SAME.