Ask.com has thrown in the towel in chasing internet search leader Google and instead will focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.
Ask.com will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.
According to it’s press release, Ask.com will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions of especial concern to women, recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment and health.
The decision to cater to married women comes after Ask spent years trying to build a better all-purpose search engine than Google.
According to comScore, Ask.com ranked 5th in search engine traffic in the U.S. with a 4.5 percent market share.
If you are correct in your article Ask.com has made a very smart move.
As the population is increasing and growing that kind of service to cater to married women is in demand.
This is not a matter of our opinion, it is from a press release of ask.com.
I think it is amazing that they have moved in this direction and away from the search channel.
I do not share your enthusiasm for this move.
I thought that this was done by ivillage many years ago, and it never turned into a major portal.
If they could have made inroads through their own network and could have captured 10% of the U.S. search market, it would have been a better move for them.
Agree that this is a mistake; and sorry to see it.
There were several things they could have done (and not done) to raise their search profile and percentage of the market; including their ineffective advertising.
There’s already plenty of sites and resources–including iVillage (which has never lived up to expectations)–for woman; married and not.
Would have been better to go after a truly fast growing market like 50+ years young folks…or how about building a new ad platform specifically for monetizing domains.
Steve
Or how about taking their business to the .EU and setting up shop there trying to capture that market like Baidu did in china.
Its a big world.
Or how about a develop their own ad network instead of using Google.
Yup.
Were they to build out a new ad network (which they’ve apparently already done to a fair degree anyway)/ ad platform with complete transparency for domainers, they’d be buried in business … forever.
This is a rumor.
See:
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628647
According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, nothing could be further from the truth. “The idea that we’re going to become a women’s site is just plain wrong.”