Loomia Partners With Wall Street Journal

Loomia, a recommendation engine that is used by ecommerce and content websites to suggest new stuff to users, locked up a marquee business development deal with the Wall Street Journal.

The module, which appears next to stories, suggests other Wall Street Journal content based on what the user has read previously on the site, and compared to what other users have read, too. The module is titled “People Who Read This…” – see image below.

Loomia competes directly with Aggregate Knowledge, a high flying startup that has raised a total of $25 million in venture capital.

Like Aggregate Knowledge, Loomia offers its core recommendation engine to both content providers and ecommerce sites. Their pricing differs based on the type of partner – they charge a CPM for content sites and a percentage of sales that can be tracked to referrals for ecommerce sites. Pricing is here. They also have a free product for blogs and other smaller sites.

Ultimately, what Aggregate Knowledge and Loomia are offering are merchandising tools to Internet companies. Sites like Amazon can afford to develop their own solutions in-house, but other sites, battling razor thin margins already, need to outsource this. Companies like Loomia and Aggregate Knowedge are there to fill that need. BazaarVoice is another company in this sector, although they offer a different product – reviews and commenting features.