Marketing Pilgrim

Ask’s parent company IAC posted $1B in losses largely because it wrote down the value of its search business. But, says the AP, this is actually good news for the online ad market (and not because a competitor is about to get out of the market)—because IAC didn’t do as badly as expected.

No, because it beat estimates by 2¢ per share, a nine-figure loss “offered the latest indication that the online advertising market is improving,” as the AP says. IAC investors seemed to agree, since it the stock jumped four percent after the results were posted.

Did you get the sarcasm in that one? If a picture is worth a thousand words then Yahoo, bing and Ask.com must be saying “Oh crap, not again!” 250 times right now. Experian’s Hitwise shows why.

As we talk about often it’s not even that Google is on top anymore. That’s a given. In fact, its dominance is what makes the uninformed cry monopoly. Once again market dominance doesn’t mean it’s the only game in town. People just like it better and use it more.

I’ve decided that I really don’t need as many of you coming to Marketing Pilgrim each day.

In fact, I’ve decided to start charging for the content that we publish.

Oh, but I will still keep the advertisers’ money. They’ll just have to get used to the idea that we don’t have as many eyeballs viewing their ads.

And, lastly, I’m kicking out Google. Yeah, I don’t need it bringing any additional readers to the site. They just consume extra bandwidth.

Have I gone insane?

I haven’t–I’m not really doing any of the above–but media mogul Rupert Murdoch quite possibly has!

Barry Diller is getting close to waving his white flag in the search wars.

During IAC’s quarterly earnings conference call, the top dog made it quite clear that Ask.com may be on the chopping block:

"We’ve been asked a lot whether we’re open to consolidating transactions in the area of search. The answer is yes," Diller said. "And, it is unlikely that we would be the consolidator."

While Diller cautioned "you cannot really make any absolutes" about deals, he acknowledged that Ask.com faced a challenging environment in a search business.

Other than looking like an Old Navy commercial, I really don’t know what to make of this new Ask.com TV ad.

Still, when did Ask.com ads ever make sense?

It’s time for Microsoft to put the champagne back on ice: Bing’s market share gains are starting to evaporate.

StatCounter was the first to dare suggest that Bing was losing its sting, but now new Hitwise data suggests both Bing and Yahoo have lost US audience share in the past month:

At first glance, it looks like Bing has lost 5 percentage points of market share, but the "-5%" represents a 5% decline in its share. It dropped from 16.96% to 16.38% (not 16.96% to 11.96%).

Microsoft’s Bing continues to grow its market share, according to comScore. They’re up from 8% (Microsoft’s market share at launch) to 9.3% (that astounding leap represents over 16% growth!! Google’s growth rate, by comparison, is paltry! Paltry, I tell you!). And we probably have to ascribe at least a little of their growth to their $100M marketing blitz.

So, AllThingsD asks, can marketing do the same for Yahoo (and, well, “you“)—and if so, should Yahoo be excited or concerned? After all, $100M seems pretty steep for 1.3 percentage points (even if it is over 16% growth!! [the sarcasm is because we all need reminders of how people lie with statistics]).

In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.

Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”

What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports: