Newsmaker: Asking more of Ask.com than of Jeeves

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I want to ask you about ad spending trends. Google's blowout quarter last week seems to put aside any concerns that online ad spending growth was dimming. What ad spending trends are you seeing at Ask.com and how long can search companies ride this wave?
Lanzone: Well right now, there is an insatiable demand for clicks, for traffic from online advertising...from search advertising...We're limited as an industry by the growth in the number of searches that are done, and so it's good to see that search overall has been growing at a 15 percent clip on a monthly basis. And search is still growing in the United States and especially worldwide, so I don't see any slowdown in the near future. At the end of the day you're (only) going to be constricted by inventory.

Any other revenue opportunities that you might be looking into?
Lanzone: For the Ask business, we can already make a lot of money through search. Our objective is getting more searches, not trying to make more money per search. And in fact, we've gone other ways where we have the least advertising on our page of any search engine. We don't have ads down the right-hand side of the page (as rivals have). We have our related search suggestions there, and so we've invested back into the user experience as opposed to try to make more money by putting more ads (on the search results page).

You're traveling internationally right now, aren't you?
Lanzone: Yes. I'm giving the keynote speech on Wednesday at the SES show in Milan, which is Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Strategies conference.

And how is Ask doing internationally?
Lanzone: Great. Prior to the acquisition by IAC, we were not in very many countries. We were in the U.S. and the U.K. and had just launched a site in Spain. After the acquisition, we're now continuing to launch sites in Europe. We're now in Germany, France, Italy and the Netherlands, as well as Spain. And we continue also to operate in Japan. You will continue to see us growing internationally. It's another great way for us to grow market share and to grow the volume of searches that we have.

Ask.com has sort of been on the sidelines during the whole debate over Google, Yahoo and MSN self-censoring and cooperating with authorities in China, and I just want to see what's your take on that? Would Ask.com do anything differently?
Lanzone: I can't say what we would or wouldn't do. I'll just say we actually have launched a development team in China in the past six months, and we have every intention of operating in Asia. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  

More Newsmakers

[Jim Hubbard]

Want to grow ASK? 2 words.....

Open API.