Ask Jeeves Steps out from under Google’s Ad Umbrella - Future Outlook and Plans
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Ask Jeeves does not intend to stop running Google ads, at least not at first. Its advertising relationship with Google will indeed run through 2007 as originally scheduled. Paul Gardi, executive vice president and general manager of IAC Advertising Solutions, emphasized that point when the company announced the new program. “The relationship with Google is a strong one, and the intention here is not to replace it. The intention is to help advertisers who want a direct relationship with Ask Jeeves.”
Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch believed that advertisers might buy direct if they wanted to pay a premium to rank well on Ask Jeeves. He reasoned that the company would only show its own ads when it believes it would earn more money from those than from displaying Google ads for the same searches. Given that Ask Jeeves splits the revenue for Google ads with the larger search engine, however – a split that would not exist with ads purchased directly – it seems likely that an advertiser might end up paying less to rank well with Ask Jeeves than with Google.
This makes sense because Ask Jeeves has a smaller reach than Google, but it could still be large enough for many advertisers. Nielson/NetRatings stated in May that the Ask Jeeves network reaches nearly a quarter of the total online population. And while Ask Jeeves users tend to avail themselves of the site only half as often as Yahoo! or Google users (according to analysis by Compete Inc.), Ask Jeeves claims that its audience does not overlap the major search engines nearly as much as, say, Google’s audience overlaps Yahoo!’s. This might be attractive to some advertisers.
The potential success of the program remains questionable. Ask Jeeves is a perennial also-ran in the search engine market, which may make people hesitant to advertise directly – or, indeed, to take Ask Jeeves seriously. But Barry Diller hopes to make the company into a serious threat to Google, as well as use it to bind his disparate internet properties together.
Diller envisions someone looking for a date at Match.com, then searching Ask Jeeves to plan a date, and eventually winding up at Hotels.com – all three of these being properties owned by IAC. If he can make this type of “networking” work, it could potentially increase the value of advertising with Ask Jeeves by offering the possibility of continuity of ads within the network – and, as any advertiser knows, repetition helps to make the sale. For now, though, we will have to see whether Diller can repeat the success of his Fox television network with Ask Jeeves as the mortar holding together his web properties network.
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