IAC Retooling Ask, Cutting 40
IAC's new plan for Ask: It's not, as we reported last week, ditching Teoma, the engine that powers the search service. But it is firing 40 people -- 8% of the workforce -- and retooling Ask so it appeals more to its core audience. Who's that? "Women, with a high concentration of users in their late 30s in the U.S. Midwest and Southeast," according to Reuters.
Jim Safka, who took over IAC's (IACI) search service two months ago after Jim Lanzone was pushed out, offers up a few more details to the WSJ:
Mr. Safka outlined a new strategy for the search engine that aims to increase the loyalty of its core customers. Instead of trying to build products that would appeal to "the digerati" or "West Coast elite," as Ask had been, he wants to focus Ask on meeting the needs of its core audience, predominantly women who use the site to ask questions about topics like entertainment and health. To do that, he says the company will launch new products and enhance its technology through efforts like pulling in more community-generated answers.
We certainly think Ask should change what it's doing, since it's not working. And we like the idea of niche/vertical search engines. We can't quite get our heads around what niche Ask thinks it's serving here, as "women who aren't that computer savvy and don't live in Silicon Valley" seems awfully broad to us. But anything is better than plodding along and hoping that a better marketing campaign can fix things.
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Nice job...awesome for morale. Oh and good luck hiring people into a crime ridden Oakland office to work on serving housewives. After 2 months, and THIS is what he has come up with?
CPM will be fastest-growing revenue stream for publishers in 2008
Online revenue set to increase while print income flattens or decreases
Content owners must ensure visibility within fragmenting digital landscape by embracing RSS, widgets and toolbars.
Publishers see vertical search as opportunity to ‘reclaim the online community from Google’.
The fastest-growing revenue streams for publishers in 2008 will be internet display advertising and online sponsorship.
Some 72% of publishers are expecting an increase in income from CPM advertising next year and 67% are predicting a rise in digital sponsorship, while print revenues are more likely to flatten or decrease. Just under two thirds (64%) are expecting a rise in paid search (PPC) revenue.
The findings come from a survey which was circulated to members of the Association of Online Publishers (AOP), American Business Media (ABM), Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK) and E-consultancy’s early-adopter community of internet marketers.
The research also highlights the need for specialist publishers to react quickly to major changes in the digital environment in order to maintain and increase their market share and visibility.
Publishers need to adapt to maximize their digital revenues at a time of shifting advertising budgets. Trends in digital marketing are leading towards a fragmentation of the online landscape and ‘atomization’ of content. Content owners have a great opportunity to increase visibility for their content through the effective use of vertical search, feeds, widgets and toolbars.
The level of uptake for feeds and customized homepages is very high among this early-adopter audience surveyed but this kind of online behavior will soon become more widespread among knowledge workers across a wider range of industries.â€
Some 93% of more than 500 media and internet professionals said that they would be ‘very likely’ or ‘quite likely’ to use a search engine that focused on serving their specific business or work needs.
More than 70% of publishers perceived ‘reclaiming the online community from Google’ to be either a major benefit or a minor benefit from vertical search.
To download a free online copy of the full report, click here http://www.convera.com/survey/
I do think Safka did a great job at Match, and I think the record supports that. More broadly, I don't understand why you'd be skeptical that they can grow share by focusing on a brand and product that caters their actual users (red-state families), instead of wasting money trying to attract folks away from Google.
This post also does not answer why IAC/Ask would return to focusing on something that did not work for Ask when it was Ask Jeeves. I agree this sounds like a strange outcome for Ask.
In my own research, I've seen a ton of support for the idea that the Google brand resonates a lot less with these demographics.
And, based on his turnaround work on Match, I have personally seen how solid a brand marketer this guy is.