Ask.com: Is 5% not enough?
Written on 10th January 2008
3 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Jim Lanzone in happier times…
Last week Don Dodge (Director, Business Development at Microsoft) calculated that each 1% of market share in search is worth at least $1 Billion in market cap. That may be but Ask.com, which has ‘only’ has 5% of the search market, seems to be struggling.
Just yesterday it announced that it is replacing its CEO Jim Lanzone with InterActive Corp. (IAC) executive Jim Safka. Safka also worked at Match.com, E*Trade and AT&T.
Lanzone had only been with Ask.com since April 2006 when he replaced Steve Berkowitz who left at that time to head up Microsoft’s MSN and Windows Live platforms. Don’t write Lanzone off by the way! He is joining Silicon Valley venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures as an entrepreneur-in-residence. Expect to hear from him again soon.
So what can be learned here? Well, maybe that having a large chunk of traffic isn’t a ticket to success. Monetizing traffic and turning visitors into users isn’t easy. Just ask Jim Lanzone and Steve Berkowitz. Or better yet, lets ask you: how would you monetize 5% of the search market?
Ask.com’s traffic over the last 3 years:
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By Joop on Jan 10, 2008
“Monetizing traffic and turning visitors into users isn’t easy.” Okay, let me give a user response on Ask; not on the management. Imagine that my parents would be aware of chosing a search engine besides live, google or MSN; if he did, he would find the same dissapointment as most users have found. Ask.com is just not crawling as much (useful results) as Google does. It’s to bad, because I love ask.com, its AJAX frontend; customized results (like Daum) and privacy mode… I would instead put my money on wikea.com. Since they are a new player and they have a serious chance to create the fuzz and expand their userbase . Ask.com needs to find a way to get to the late majority; not only with innovation but with simple search quality.
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By Jack on Jan 10, 2008
I’d leverage the ‘Social Ads’ technology that we’re going to unleash on the world during early February. But that’s just me. And I’m biased. (Balls to ad:sense.)
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By Marek on Jan 11, 2008
@ Joop
Did you mention wikea.com? I went there and it said “the domain name is for sale”. So you’re making quite high-risk bids it seems.
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