cfx211 - 8:56 pm on Feb 25, 2003 (gmt 0)

Your Overture, you have just spent $200+ million in the last month to buy AV and FAST. By buying the two of them, you have hedged your bets against your big clients building their own PPC and squeezing you out because you are now an asset yourself that is worth buying.

You now have all the assets you need, but you are still dependent on everyone else for traffic. Doesn't it make sense to try to further hedge your bets, by trying to resurrect a search brand where you keep 100% of the revenue?

I would not be surprised once they have digested everything to see them throw $10 million into marketing AV or New Brand to try to see if they can compete as a consumer offering.

Search kings have been knocked off before, so why not try it again? Especially now when your business can be modeled in an X volume of searches yields X amount of cash format. Once you have that model down, you just need to figure out if the cost of picking up share is less than the search revenue it returns, and that is where a $10 million experiment would be worthwhile.