COMTEX Announces an Anti-Ticker Spamming Initiative

January 8, 2001

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—(business wire)—Jan. 8, 2001 — COMTEX News Network, Inc. (OTC BB:CMTX), announced today that it is employing a new "Primary Ticker Value-Add", an anti-ticker spamming initiative, in an effort to address an industry problem and limit over-tickering to more effectively provide customers with pertinent information needed to perform news searches based on company ticker symbols.

Enhancing publisher content by adding tickers is a key COMTEX value-add that over 1100 customers depend on for effective access to targeted content. Increasingly, corporations are including full descriptive paragraphs at the end of press releases that include a list of companies with whom they do business.

Until now, all companies listed were tickered including companies not of primary interest or integral to the press release content. The COMTEX primary ticker value-add eliminates the tickering of these extraneous companies and provides ticker symbols only for the companies central to the release content.

The COMTEX primary ticker value-add is built on and leverages COMTEX' proprietary content aggregation technology, Equinox, COMTEX' 10 years of industry experience of working with the dependent variables and factors to effectively determine the relevancy of a primary ticker.

Equinox eliminates redundancy, over-tickering or ticker spamming in real-time and for customers choosing to take advantage of this new technology, only minimal integration on the part of COMTEX customers is required.

"Ticker spamming has created confusion and can potentially devalue legitimate news. Including tickers that are neither newsworthy nor relevant diminishes the content that serious distributors and users demand. As the leading infomediary and industry pioneer, it was COMTEX' role to provide the market with a proactive solution," said Sheri Robey-Lapan, Vice President, Marketing & Corporate Strategy, in charge of product development for COMTEX. "This initiative allows COMTEX to better provide its customers with relevant news and information so they can deliver the best possible content and products to their subscribers."