2007 In Numbers: The Ask Mouse Squeaked A Little Louder This Year
Duncan Riley
29 comments »
IAC got serious about its Ask property this year, investing $100 million in the United States alone on a bizarre “Ask the Algorithm” campaign that even sunk to the depths of using the Unabomber as a marketing tool. Unfortunately for good taste there’s nothing like a bit controversy to draw attention to a service and Ask’s traffic was up this year, proving once again perhaps there really is no such thing as bad publicity.
Direct traffic on Ask.com grew from 29.8 million unique visitors in November 2006 to 46 million in November 2007 after dropping to 24.4 million in February for an impressive 54% growth rate.
Ask subsites saw some amazing growth rates, but mostly off very low bases. The Algorithm has a growing market in Europe, with Ask Spain experiencing 2062% growth rate, Ask Germany at 3006% and Ask France with 606%.
Some humble pie from me: back in May I slammed Ask.com for its advertising campaign suggesting that it was too clever by half; I haven’t changed my dislike of a campaign that suggested that “The Algorithm constantly finds Jesus” but the numbers don’t lie: it worked and worked well. Congrats and Christmas well wishes to the team at Ask; you’ve still got a long way to go to catch up to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft but at least you’re heading in the right direction, and competition is always a good thing.
Ask’s full numbers below:
If the numbers are indeed true and a clear cause of the algorithm campaign, it’s a big win for Crispin Porter.
I really don’t think such and increase to be just because because one single ad campaign. Look at Ask Spain, its 2063% up and I am not even sure the campaign was done there
“and competition is always a good thing”
Truer words are rarely spoken.
Many of the readers were against the campaign but as you can see the numbers are in Ask’s favour. As I was saying back when The Algorithm was released - the campaign was a good one and now we cam say that we have a 4th player in the game.
But the main feature of ASK is the user interface.
Happy Hollydays
I like the new Ask.com format and frankly like their new ‘Eraser’ tool. Whether it really does erase all my old records to sites I’ve visited, it’s still a nice little feature.
How much did google spend on advertising? heh.
Let me know in a couple of months what their numbers are. They get a boost now but next year it will get back to normal when they see how bad the results are.
I started using Ask Germany lately and liking the results better. In English I still use Google but am still frequently frustrated with results. It’s good for consumer searches but anything else - still too many bad links, irrelevant and other issues with the results, although Google is still giving me better results than Ask in English.
To me it’s always been about the product, not the ads. Their web search interface, local search and blog search are the best of any company’s. I think they’re getting used because the product is better–much of the time. (I still use google too, but Ask is a much better experience and more and more I’m tuning to them first.)
Is Ask paying for this too?
IMO, the ad campaign failed miserably - the growth would be the same (probably better) if they didn’t do the stupid “Algorithm” ads.
More interesting stats would be search market share, which would validate my guess above.
Just checked Ask again with my usual queries, the results suck as usual — they should really spend the money on improve the size and freshness of their index and algorithm itself.
It has nothing to do with the ad campaign.As it got failed.The numbers that are shown above.Nice to see ask performing well.As i have always liked it.
Thanks for the Information
Ididak
Ask isn’t paying for this: numbers don’t lie. If they’d showed a drop I would have called it the way you are, but they didn’t drop, they grew.
Try Microsoft.com!
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
if you ask me
i think that ask.com is a joke
best,
carl
Hold up. The traffic they received most likely did not help the ROI. This is how success needs to be measured in cases like this.
I was in the Bay Area once in the spring and drove past that billboard proclaiming that “The Algorithm constantly finds Jesus.”
I laughed and laughed. It actually compelled me to try Ask. That lasted for about a week. Then I went back to Google.
Ask is a great crew and a great service. The ad campgain, ech… I could take it or leave it. But who cares? Good product, bad ads is much better than the other way around. We’re seeing some scrappiness from Ask which is welcome in a sphere where the only competitors are duds like Yahoo and MSN. Even Google is not innovating much on Search anymore. They have everything to lose by doing so. If I were in Ask’s shoes I’d keep taking bigger and bigger bets. Sure, Microsoft has all the market share, but everyone wants to be Apple.
So, where’s the ROI?
I like the innovative way for search through ask.com, they have improved significantly.
That’s a very impressive growth rate, thanks for this very informative post.
Nhick
http://www.itrush.com
This is a very big LIE!
They are spending a lot of dollars in mileading ads in spanish!
For example they use ads with semi nude girls and when you click on it you end up in es.ask.com searching for “digital cameras” for example!!!
Ismael Briasco
http://www.psicofxp.com
The German growth is surprising, I hardly know any people who have heared about ask.com in Germany and they didn’t do any advertising at least not in between January to August.
Nice try, but, MSInquire.com is coming out next month and will make everything else look primitive.
fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
I still think Ask is pretty lame. It doesn’t have enough to make me switch over. And $100 million is a lot.
That’s interesting growth but even though Ask won’t compete google.
Ask Germany over 800% growth -hmm - its huge - one of the reason could be the cooperation with a lot of german local Searchengines and Portals- so they just kicked out Google and got Ask in their Websearch-forms… and they´ve got a lot of Big-german players so -thats the answer for Growth with no Big Ad campaign
http://www.lukas119.de