Barry Diller and the folks over at IAC Interactive (IACI) should throw in the towel on Ask.com, their search engine, and sell the rights for search across their other sites to Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) or Yahoo! (YHOO). Recent figures show that Ask only has 3% of the search market and that is down 28% year-over-year based on measurements made in February.
News Corp (NWS) was able to get $900 million from Google as a minimum payment for an exclusive right to provide search functions and search-based ads to MySpace. News Corp’s monthly audience (including MySpace) in January was about 140 million unique visitors worldwide. IACI’s comparable figure was 109 million. One of the large search engines would certainly be willing to put up a huge deposit for that.
Ask.com is dead. At 3% of the market, it can’t ever take a large enough bite to make the property worthwhile. But Diller could get a substantial figure for the search rights across all of his online businesses and he should.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
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