IAC Earnings Drop But Ask.com Grows

Feb 6, 2007 at 10:02am ET by Barry Schwartz

Last night Ask.com’s parent company, IAC, reported earnings. Bloomberg reports that IAC’s profits dropped 98 percent in the fourth-quarter. The blame goes to the “entertainment coupon division.” But Ask.com’s media and ad segment division did pretty well, showing a growth of 46 percent in revenue from $109.5 million in Q4 2005 to $159.8 million in Q4 2006.

Related Topics: Ask: Business Issues | Channel: Industry

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://dmehus.blogspot.com/ Doug Mehus

Those are good numbers and show good growth potential for Ask.com, but one thing that concerns me vis a vis IAC Search & Media (which includes Ask.com) is their complete failure to relaunch their Excite and MyWay portals. Innovation on portal design and technology is happening at their Excite Europe and Asia units but nothing at at either of the above two portals since acquiring them three years ago in March.

Moreover, the design for the Excite.com and MyWay.com web portals is the same as it was in 2001 when iWon Inc. acquired its assets out of the bankruptcy courts.

- Doug