AskJeeves - desperate advertising move.

They've dropped the butler.

[Hawkgirl]

AskJeeves dropped the butler [story.news.yahoo.com] from their ads in a move to bring more people to the site.

"If the butler isn't there (in the ads), we think more consumers might wonder what happened to him and come to our site to see if he's still around," said Ask Jeeves President Steve Berkowitz. "We are trying to communicate the message that there is something different going on at our company."

But we know what happened to him ... he died of boredom because no one visits him anymore.

Ask Jeeves accounted for just three percent of U.S. searches in June.

[moltar]

their bot is very rude and i think many people just blocked it. well, i did.

[martinibuster]

Dropping the butler from it's advertising is gimmicky at best. It's good to see that they are finally sobering up enough to realize that increasing their market share is a priority.

Despite their recent media hype campaign about increasing year over year pageviews by 37% (they actually had 1 million LESS unique visitors in the second quarter 2003 compared with first quarter 2003), they still only hold onto a very tiny slice of the pie- 3%.

Also of interest in the story is that 49% of their revenue came from Google adwords.

Ask has previously stated that they are fixing to purchase something, and their ceo Berkowitz has said that he'd be surprised if it didn't happen by the end of this year.

Is that a PPC company on their shopping list? Ah, but that would shut them out of Google's 100,000 advertisers. With a 3% market share they will have a devil of a time replicating the AdWords revenue stream.

At present it looks like they are stuck sharing revenue and reach with Google.

Could it be Kaltix that's on their shopping list? Kaltix would not only complement their technology, but would do wonders for their stock price. And would accomplish absolutely nothing for increasing their market share- in the short run.

Any way you look at this, AskJeeves has a lot of work to do. Advertising is a good strategy. Let's hope they spend their money wisely.

[Hawkgirl]

> Let's hope they spend their money wisely.

Well ... looks like this campaign is a paltry $6 million. Paltry in comparison to the "$116.9 million in marketing and sales" the company spent in 1999 and 2000, according to the article. ;)

[mivox]

"If the butler isn't there (in the ads), we think more consumers might wonder what happened to him and come to our site to see if he's still around,"

Um... They're unable to grasp the fact that nobody really cares, aren't they?

[PatrickDeese]

I'll say that something is up with Jeeves - I just did a search for my primary keyword target for a regional destination and instead of my regional directory showing up in the first couple of slots - my business site that really only mentions this destination in a few places, in a matter-of-fact sort of way (ie on the contact info page, etc.) is in the #1 slot (after the adwords).

That's just weird.

"Uh... bring the butler back - your SERPs suck."