Ask.com gets a makeover, lays off 40 | Hacker News Reader

Ask.com gets a makeover, lays off 40

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12 pointsmoog5 comments

If this is a temporary change so they can survive until Aug 2008 then this is a good strategy:

nearly a third of the first 500 Googlers have departed, and many more of the estimated 2,200 pre-IPO employees are planning an exit as their stock vests [in Aug 2008]. -- http://www.news.com/Life-after-Google%2C-with-millions/2100-...

If this is a permanent change then they're screwed:

a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition. -- http://www.paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

they're not trying to avoid competition. They're trying to focus on the only demographic that was taking them serioulsy. Their current strategy wasn't working and I think they actually increase their market share by stealing users from Google. Before they were trying to steal all re users, now they only want to steal married women. That's likely a good thing. Married women probably click on ads more often than recent college graduates, news.YC readers, etc.

I thought that they were doing quite well on their current course, despite the advertising being quite bizarre and easy to dismiss:

Believe me, I'm not shilling for Ask.com. On the contrary: during the month I recently spent in London I was forced to watch endless runs of Ask's faux-amateur commercials ... -- an experience that made me want to rip my eyeballs out, right after I burned down the offices of Ask's advertising agency. ... I remember watching the ads with another Silicon Valley veteran, who shook his head and said, "Why would a company willing to spend millions to take on a juggernaut like Google do so with these unbelievably lame and degrading ads?" -- http://abcnews.go.com/Business/IndustryInfo/story?id=4027940

However, the most recent adverts got it together and promoted features not found elsewhere. Furthermore, as an experiment to test the stickiness of Google, I got a couple of users to switch from Google to Ask. (I also got one to switch from Photoshop to GIMP.) Anyhow, I'm really surprised by the specialisation, both the timing and the demographic. Its like an admission of failure when matters seemed to be improving.

This article could almost have appeared in The Onion - who could be excited about working for a company that just shifted its focus like that?

"In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives."

""Everyone at Ask is excited about our clear focus and the trajectory-changing results it will deliver," he said in a statement."

I don't see them going anywhere, they are steady at #4 behind Goog, Yahoo, MSN.. and I don't see them beating any of those; now is where you get lean and profitable.

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