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How Will Ask Profit? Should've Asked the Prophet
September 20, 2006
Our own Sean Bolton goes on a rant now and again, and more often than not, he's right.
Last December, he took Ask to task for not being particularly realistic in continuing with its homegrown PPC program. In particular, he had this to say:
Perhaps Mr. Jeeves should ask himself a few questions:
- Does it make sense for me to continue PPC when I can just earn similar or possibly better revenue by just leveraging the existing relationship with Google for AdWords rev?
- Will I do an effective enough job in PPC sales and customer service to some day kill my relationship with Google and keep all the green to myself?
- Why do I have less than 6% market share in the search engine war?
I kept this in mind when reading today's MediaPost article, Diller: Ask.com To Continue Outsourcing Paid Search, which specifically states that back when IAC purchased Ask,
...one of the company's priorities was developing its own paid search platform for advertisers. But Barry Diller said Tuesday that the company has since changed its strategy. Now, he said, IAC is focusing more on drawing consumers to the site than selling its own pay-per-click ads to marketers."Queries will build revenue," Diller said at a Goldman Sachs investor conference. He said the company's goal is to capture 10 percent of search queries--up from around 2 percent on Ask.com now and 5-6 percent considering other offerings.
Sean's above saying he told us so, but I'm not. He told us so.
All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 20, 2006 04:06 PM
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