Ask.com $100 Million Dollar Campaign Showing Results?
November 2, 2007 by Pablo Palatnik
Ask.com has spent about $100 million in advertising and branding its search engine to the public. I think they put a really good marketing campaign but nevertheless, with market share growing, so have the market share of the other 2 giants, Google and Yahoo…even MSN.
Is Ask.com a legitimate competitor in the search market? Yes and no. If you’re an online marketer, you’re not seeing great results from you ask.com campaigns if you’re running campaigns in the search engine, even though they still use Google results in their paid search results as well. I’m not even sure if Ask.com has an Adsense program but if they do, they are hurting in that market as well.
Now, for the general public, as a website and product, I really do like ask.com. I think it’s a unique search engine offering a different type of search for the user. If you haven’t done a search in a while, you’d be really surprise as how it has developed from a year or two years ago. It loads a bit slow but that’s because it pulls images, videos, etc…and obviously doesn’t have the hosting power Google does.
Hitwise reports, “…Ask’s share of executed searches in the U.S. growing 23.7% from 3.49% of all executed searches in August 2007 to 4.32% of executed searches in September 2007.â€
But then again, MarketingVox reports, “everybody had a good September. Google and Yahoo gained more search market share in September than Ask, with Google jumping to 63.55 percent of all searches. Even AOL caught up to and surpassed Ask.â€
It comes down to owning properties and how many partnerships each engine has to distribute ads. Millions of sites display Google adsense…there is the key to Google, besides making billions of the engine search itself with the Adwords platform. Yahoo Publisher Network has some good distribution but doesn’t come close to Adsnese…and now Microsoft is in the game landing Digg as a distributors and probably other big sites.
Where is Ask in all of this? They will have to form partnerships and have a good ad distribution channel and volume to compete in the search market.
