5th October 1998
Thomson Directories Limited today announces the formation of a joint venture with Infospace.com (Infospace.com) of Redmond, Washington, USA. Infospace.com has established a position as one of the world’s highly trafficked websites through a strategy of aggregation and syndication; creating and distributing tailor-made packages of web-site content.

The new company will be called TDL Infospace (Europe) Ltd and will distribute Thomson’s directory information and other content across Infospace.com’s 900 affiliate sites.

The UK directory information will be added to Infospace.com’s aggregated content packages which include local weather forecasts, news and e-commerce merchants. These are co-branded and distributed across some of the most popular sites such as Netscape, AOL and Disney and collectively generate more than 200 million page impressions every month.

TDL Infospace (Europe) Ltd will launch a similar operation in the UK and will distribute tailor-made content packages to other websites, digital tv and mobile phones.

According to Gary List, chief executive of Thomson Directories : "Infospace.com, like ourselves, started on the Internet with directory data and has rapidly grown to be one of the largest online information providers.

"We have already made significant investment in electronic directory products and intend to generate new revenue streams by replicating Infospace.com's highly successful business model in this country and across Europe. This joint venture will allow us to leapfrog our competition by offering a concept that is still relatively unknown outside the US."

Naveen Jain, President and CEO of Infospace.com stated : " Creating this joint venture is a perfect way for Infospace.com to bring its innovative aggregation and syndication approach to benefit UK and European Internet users and advertisers. Thomson Directories, the largest independent provider of print directory information in the United Kingdom is the ideal partner for this, providing complementary skills and expertise."

For further information please contact our Press office.