The DN Journal reports that the Ask.com division Ask Sponsored Listings, which is an IAC company, has acquired domain monetization company Sendori. Founded in August 2006, Sendori is a relatively new service acting as a middle-man between owners of premium type-in domains and advertisers looking to buy additional quality traffic to their websites.

Instead of monetizing the domain through a parking page and earning money per click, Sendori allows domain owners to directly sell their traffic to advertisers who will pay per visit. This has made Sendori’s advertising program an innovative approach to matching the needs of traffic buyers and those owning the traffic sources, the domain name owners.

Direct navigation traffic is high-quality traffic that converts well, so buying direct traffic is a good option for businesses to send thousands of additional clients to their online destinations every day. At the time of the acquisition, Sendori had 130,000 advertisers buying a total of 33 million page views per month. This massive amount of traffic surely is one of the reasons why Ask.com/IAC has been interested in the company. It’s also a good addition to Ask.com’s portfolio of online businesses. Today, every search and online marketing business needs a strong base of advertisers and traffic to be able to compete with Google to some extent instead of completely falling behind. Ask.com has shown deep knowledge of the value of generic domains in the past: Last year it bought the Lexico Publishing Group, owner of the Dictionary.com portfolio of domains and websites. Other domains part of that deal were Thesaurus.com and Reference.com.

The takeover of Sendori marks an important strategic move by Ask.com, which now has a lot more traffic to drive to its growing group of online advertisers. It is a small player compared to Google, therefore this was also a necessary acquisition.