IACI (Interactive Corp), Ask’s parent company, is currently valued at around $5.5 billion. IAC owns bunch of solid companies - Ticketmaster, HSN, Lending Tree, the list goes on. They’re going to spin off all those companies in the near future, leaving Ask.com as the “core” of IAC, along with some other web properties like Collegehumor.com.

What will IACI be valued at it’s just Ask.com? Who knows? Could be $2 or 3 billion. Google should scoop them up for that price. If Youtube was worth $2.6 billion, Ask is damn sure worth that much or more.

Adding another 4.5% U.S. search market share would be a big boost to G’s bottom line. Ask is currently running itself into the ground. The ads are out of control. 8 ads on top of real results? Are they serious? Their users are going to start leaving in droves.

I guess the main roadblock would probably be anti-trust. It would reduce competition a bit, but Ask already uses Google to provide the vast majority of their ads. And they’re currently ruining the business anyways.

Ask.com has a different audience than Google. So they should keep the unique interface, maybe improve the relevancy a bit. Let it operate semi-independently from the rest of G.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Internet Marketing, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.