Ask Sponsored Listings Buys Sendori (Direct Navigation Aggregator)

Interesting move and interesting timing

[Webwork]

Ask Sponsored Listings Announces Acquisition Of Sendori [sendori.com]

From the press release:

Ask Sponsored Listings, a division of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI), today announced the acquisition of Sendori - the next generation exchange for direct navigation search.

Sendori sends qualified visitors from undeveloped web domains directly to advertiser websites. . . . Sendori will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of IAC.

The Sendori exchange has grown quickly as domain parking companies diversify their monetization strategies . . . The exchange provides more than 130,000 advertisers with access to 33 million unique visitors each month. Sendori’s PureLeads™ technology is instrumental in every brokered transaction, ensuring the highest degree of integrity for visitors delivered to an advertiser’s website.

Is this a technology play or a traffic play?

If Ask is willing to buy Sendori might Ask be willing to buy Name Admin? With PPC revenue down (at the moment) is Ask getting a bargain? Hard to say right now as financial terms were not disclosed.

Might his also be a global play? We tend to think of direct navigation as a .Com USA play but might direct navigation have an emerging role to play in India? China? The world? So, by acquiring Sendori's brand AND technology, might Ask be betting a leg up?

"Qualified leads"? A better play than a pure PPC play? Methinks so, with the right domains.

As always I find IAC an interesting firm, though it tends to loose steam after executing some very interesting strategies - such as acquiring Ask.com in the first place.

"More traffic! More traffic!"

Maybe IAC has gotten the message that direct navigation domains - such as say Hotels.com - do a nice job of delivering prequalified leads? :p

[edited by: Webwork at 11:05 pm (utc) on Jan. 22, 2009]

[IanTurner]

I was quite impressed with the Sendori business model. Was a neat twist on standard PPC landing pages, effectively allowing end consumers to bid on aggregated type in traffic in their field.

Their pricing was slightly above what I was paying for PPC traffic when I spoke to them, so was not a viable option for me but then I'm in a fairly niche field. For those in more mainstream B2C arenas the pricing looked good.

IAC have been around a goodly number of years and don't make too many mistakes, though they may be too diverse for their own good (that's the pot calling the kettle black by the way)