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.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c6338b00-dddb-11dd-87dc-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
As reported by the Financial Times in the article linked above, Microsoft (MSFT) is again (or perhaps still) interested in Yahoo’s search business (YHOO). Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, told the FT that the software company was not going to fully take over Yahoo, but it was going to get a search deal done with the world’s number two search engine. Both companies are currently going through changes in their management teams: Yahoo is looking for a new CEO and Microsoft now has Qi Lu, Yahoo’s former search chief, leading its online division. That would make it a perfect time for the search deal, said Ballmer.
I don’t want to go into the details of the ongoing negotiations between MSFT and YHOO, where even Google (GOOG) has played a role for some time, but I can say that after more than one year I’m actually tired of hearing the many rumors about Microsoft and Yahoo. I’m sure Google has been laughing all the time while slowly but steadily growing its market share in the online search and advertising markets. That’s why I can only hardly understand why Microsoft and Yahoo haven’t been able to get into a partnership, yet. Both companies are not in a position to compete with Google as of today, so merging or at least working together in some way would be the right decision for both companies.
It would also be interesting to know what influence the back and forth has had on Yahoo’s brand. I guess Yahoo has suffered a severe image loss since saying no to Microsoft’s offer to acquire the company for close to $50 billion in 2008 (Yahoo’s market value has since dropped to $17 billion). Following that were disputes with Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang and more negative press.
But I think that Balmer may have talked to Yahoo already considering that he has made the above public statements in a newspaper. Otherwise, I guess, he would have remained silent for the time being. Who knows, maybe the Microsoft/Yahoo deal is just around the corner? (Or that’s just wishful thinking of mine.)
Today I received an email from the MyLink500 LinkedIn group that I’ve been a member of. The group is going to rebrand under what may be the best domain name for this purpose: OpenNetworker.com. An open networker is a person who will accept all invitations to connect to further grow her network. As you will know, networking is a great thing that can help you grow your business. That is why I’ve been an open networker on LinkedIn and other business networks for some time now.
The rebranding of the popular MyLink500 group, which has more than 8,000 members as of today, under OpenNetworker.com has been a wise decision by the founders of the group. It’s a top-notch generic domain perfect for this type of website, and it should help further promote the group for the benefit of its many members.
By the way, I’m an open networker on LinkedIn. If you’d like to connect, feel free to get in touch with me.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/media/2008_11_05_historic_election_day_sets_traffic_records.html
According to this GigaOM article on CNN Money, yesterday’s presidential election has set a traffic record as people from all over the world went to news websites in search for the latest information on the candidates or the election in general.
What’s especially interesting, is that some television networks actually saw viewer numbers tumble compared to the 2004 election. On the Internet, however, visitor numbers rocketed high.
CNN’s website, for example, received a record 27 million unique visitors on November 4 and there were almost 5 million users of its live video stream service. The website of ABC News also received a record number of visitors with 3.4 million unique visitors and more than 24 million page views. Live streaming services like Mogulus and Akamai saw traffic peaks when Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech, too.
The 2008 presidential election campaign has truly been an Internet campaign. Barack Obama and other candidates have made extensive use of the Internet, buying advertising spots on popular websites and setting up profiles on social networking sites.
Today, one day after I wrote about Google and Yahoo having modified the terms of their search advertising partnership, Google officially announced on its blog that it would end the agreement with Yahoo.
Google justifies its decision with the ongoing criticism from government regulators and some of its advertisers. The search engine company wanted to avoid a long legal battle and further investigations that would only have led to more delays and uncertainty.
While the decision to end the agreement marks a setback in Google’s rapid growth, it could be a chance for Yahoo. The reason being that the modified agreement, which Google had just handed to the antitrust regulators, limited Yahoo’s earnings potential to 25% of the total search revenue. Now, Yahoo can continue to monetize its search traffic on its own and, more importantly, it can look around for other partners.
Microsoft seems to be the most logical choice, given that the software corporation has been interested in Yahoo for a while and that Carl Icahn, member of the board at Yahoo, is still trying to sell the company to Microsoft or at the very least to get it into a partnership with MSFT.
Yahoo is an attractive acquisition target because it is the number two search engine behind Google. The additional traffic from Yahoo’s search business and from its portal sites would immediately push the buyer into a top position in the coveted search engine market.
Yahoo’s share price is up more than 7% today, but it’s still cheap compared to the company’s market cap in 2007. Google is down almost 4% as of this writing. Microsoft is down 2%.
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