Ants.com Announces Co-Brand Creation Tool; Co-Brand Tool Enables Website Owners to Create Their Own Online Freelance Marketplaces.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SANTA BARBARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 20, 2000

Ants.com, the fastest growing marketplace for freelance work on the Internet, today announced the availability of a new easy-to-use tool that enables website owners to create and offer their own online freelance marketplaces.

Maintaining the look and feel of the parent site, these freelance marketplaces are hosted and maintained by Ants.com and remain fully linked to Ants.com's functionality and content pages. Not only do the co-branded freelance marketplaces drive site traffic, but owners of these sites earn money through referral fees paid for every person who posts or completes a project through Ants.com.

"Since its rollout, the 2Work-At-Home.com Freelance Marketplace has become one of the most frequently visited areas of our site," said website owner Sharon Davis. "The reason that it has been so successful for us is that it is such a good fit with our site content. The Marketplace naturally complements the other resources we offer, such as telecommute job listings and home-business information."

Another web site owner, Christopher De La Rosa of homejobsplus.com, said, "Ants.com worked with me to create my marketplace to look just like my site so that visitors feel they are still within the homejobsplus.com experience. The co-branding process was handled professionally, quickly, and with concern. We have both a graphic and a text link on our site that lead to the co-brand site, and we also ran a small ad in our local weekly newspaper, all of which has driven traffic and led to registrations."

"Ants.com offers a powerful engine for bringing businesses and freelancers together online," said Rick Davis, President and CEO of Ants.com. "By providing a 'cookie cutter' tool that easily enables users to create a freelance marketplace that reflects their site's look and feel, we can offer web-based businesses and their visitors easy, comfortable access to all of our resources. Plus site owners earn network referral fees every time one of their visitors successfully transacts business through our site. I call that a win-win-win situation!"

About Ants.com

With over 40,000 members and more than 30 categories of job descriptions, Ants.com is the fastest growing marketplace for freelance work, expanding at a rate of about one percent per day. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, Ants.com is dedicated to creating a liquid marketplace for the trillion-dollar worldwide freelance services market. Companies looking to outsource projects -- from programming to translation to marketing to design -- can quickly meet their needs at Ants.com, drawing from the largest pool of qualified freelancers and independent workers in the world. Ants.com is a privately held company backed by Bertelsmann Ventures (www.bvfund.com). For more information, please visit our website at www.ants.com.