Ask.com Does About Face, Concentrates On Women

Up until now, Ask.com was losing the war for popularity as a search engine against heavy hitters like Google. In fact, right up until December of last year, every thing about their visible strategy pointed to a continuation, however fruitless, of a quest for search dominance. This week, they abruptly changed focus from search to women.

It seems that Ask.com has decided to become a resource for a specific brand of woman: married and southern or midwestern. It seemed bold enough to focus on women instead of search, but to narrow it further to married, midwestern or southern seems like a drastic reduction in scope.

That perception of a reduction in scope is supported by this week's layoffs. Ask.com laid off about 8 percent of their total workforce (or about 40 employees). How will such a drastic reduction and a total change in scope away from search help Ask.com? Ad revenue.

By focusing on offering help and helpful hints and news items to this demographic, Ask.com gets to reap the benefits of ad revenue. Most married women handle the bulk of household purchases, from small things like groceries to large ticket items. some may say they consult with their husbands, but that is rare. Most of the time in traditional areas like the midwest and the south it is the wife making the buying decisions.

That makes this demographic much more valuable than its narrow scope would seem. By hosting ads directed at a target market that is finely tuned like this, Ask.com may have a chance to compete in the Ad Revenue arena and save its skin, without having to go toe to toe with Google by running ads on the web and struggling to gain and keep search engine market share.

Overall I think the switch is a smart move for Ask.com. Not only with it potentially boost revenue, it should also boost morale around the office. Gaining the eyeballs and loyalty of a segment of the midwest and south is a much more achievable task than defeating giant Google.