Ask.com – Ad Stuffing To Boost Revenues?
By Anna Johnson on December 13th, 2008TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that using Ask.com’s experimental search engine to search on generic terms such as stocks, mortgages, cars and other terms results in pages stuffed with ads.
Searching on ‘stocks’ resulted in a first page of results that included 13 ads and just 9 organic listings. Furthermore, those 13 ads were displayed above the 9 organic results.
However, it seems this was just a case of TechCrunch using one of Ask.com’s syndication partners rather than Ask.com itself. In response to TechCrunch’s findings, Ask.com said this kind of search experience was not something a person would find by going directly to Ask.com. It was based on Ask.com allowing a syndication partner to increase the number of ads to meet its individual business needs.
Meanwhile, Ask.com recently decreased the number of ads it displays on its main site. Indeed, when I searched on ‘stocks’ on Ask.com I got 19 results on the first page. Just the four results at the top and the five results at the bottom were ads. The rest were organic listings.
Question is… is ad stuffing for syndication partners or otherwise a sound strategy? Even if it’s aimed at boosting short-term revenues… it is sustainable?
December 14th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
This has been my experience when using any search engine these days. The ad reigns supreme. no matter what you are looking for. Ask.com was different. If the ad continues to reign supreme we will all retun to the old system of going to the public library.
Does progress sometimes cause a reverse?