The New York Times reported, "Scott Banister started Submit It, a free, automated resource for bringing your page to the attention of many Web-searching outfits at once.

In 1996, he brilliantly conceived an idea he called Keywords: to sell search listings based on pay-for-placement bidding – more or less the same as today's AdWords.

Banister began pitching the idea to anybody who would listen to him, including, among others, Bill Gross of IdeaLab, and the principals of LinkExchange: Tony Hsieh, Sanjay Madan, and me.Banister was still a student at UIUC in 1995 when he created ListServe.

Business Wire described the resulting partnership as "the world's most popular service for registering web sites with search engines and directories.

"[3] According to UIUC's Department of Computer Science, Alumni News, "Both Submit It and ListBot and another Web service that Banister created called ClickTrade live on as part of MSN LinkExchange.