Ask.com gives up the big fight, settles for a niche

Inter­net search engine Ask.com is thtop­wing in the towel, accord­ing to arti­cles in CNN, the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle and Dig­i­tal Trends:

Appar­ently, Ask.com believes its core demo­graphic is women using the search engine to get answers to sim­ple ques­tions; the revamped ver­sion of the site will focus on mar­ried women as its core demo­graphic, and try to answer ques­tions about health, hob­bies, fam­ily mat­ters, chil­drens’ home­work, recipes, and entertainment.

Ask.com had kept Google and Yahoo in its sights for years, but the com­pany had prob­lems expand­ing into new mar­kets. Google and Yahoo con­tin­ued to add web ser­vices and appli­ca­tions. Ask.com sim­ply could not keep up with the pace of com­pe­ti­tion, and has set­tled for a nar­row niche – mar­ried women in the south­ern and cen­tral USA – that has fewer key suc­cess fac­tors and smaller rev­enue streams.

Cur­rent CEO Jim Safka used to be the CEO at Match.com, and he is now tar­get­ing a large chunk of his old audi­ence with dif­fer­ent questions.

Tagged as: business_model, Google, key-success-factors, search, USA, Yahoo