martinibuster - 11:31 pm on Oct 29, 2009 (gmt 0)

...currently it costs more to run than it generates.

I have not seen that reported anywhere. Have a link?

It's been estimated [google.com] that Ask generates $450 million dollars in revenue per year.

Personally I think Barry Diller is swimming in the wrong direction. He's throwing away $125 million at an entertainment site, Electus, and sees sites like Hulu as the future of the Internet. Which is a concept that an old media fossil like Diller would understand. Is the past really the future? Is that where companies will flock to spend their money? Or will companies continue the trend for advertising opportunities that resemble Google where the ROI is measurable and vastly more profitable?

While Diller is cultivating entertainment sites, he's ruining CitySearch, a local search company that should be in a prime position to sell local based advertising. It was reported that their redesigned site and ad serving technology has backfired and is causing massive losses. Local Search is one of the hottest revenue areas of the Internet and Diller is so lost he turned what should be a red hot business into the drooling kid with the pointy head while competitors like Yelp run away with CitySearch's lunch money.

Diller has gutted Ask.com's talent and replaced it with IAC employees who've spent most of their careers shuttling between the different websites IAC owns. It was Diller who turned Ask.com away from the business of search and treated it like a destination site, instead of a starting point. Take a look at their press releases for 2009 [ask.mediaroom.com], there is not a single announcement related to improving or refining their search technology, and only one announcement of a partnership that extends their search audience (they became Nascar's official search engine), and one announcement of a development of a database of question and answer pairs. Everything else ASK.COM did in 2009 did not contribute to growing their technology or their search audience.

Knock, knock... Anyone home at ASK.COM?