John Battelle's Searchblog

i don't get it; according to SEW "If Ask thinks it will make more money from its own ads, it will carry more of those in preference to Google's."
Why would an advertiser go through the hassle of creating an advert on the Ask network if it will appear there anyway, for their Google CPC price?
Advertisers will only pay more for the traffic from the Ask network if they get better traffic in comparison to the Google network. Is this what Ask is promising? Otherwise i don't see them building any advertisers base. Or?

AJ's implementation is actually pretty comparable to the one MSN has had with Overture/Yahoo for the past couple of years. MSN has been pricing their paid listings in such a way that their value exceeds the revenue share they'd otherwise be getting from Yahoo. If MSN hasn't sold the inventory to a direct advertiser, they'll serve the Yahoo ads instead.

Is Ask promising that their advertisers will get better traffic than they'll get directly from Google? Of course not. They're simply creating an automated platform that will give advertisers the ability to determine how much their traffic is worth and bid accordingly. If AJ's traffic doesn't convert, (most) advertisers won't bid very aggresively for it.

@Peter: my thoughts exaclty, so either Ask hasn't done very good at negotiating their rev share with Google, or they're convinced their traffic is worth much more. If they bet on the latter, i'm not sure whether they'll be able to convince the advertisers and build a large inventory of bidded searches. But perhaps that's not their purpase anyway...perhaps the costs of their own system next to Google's doesn't require that may advertisers to break even.