“Ask captures a promising search and ads space with image sharing service Photobucket.”
New York — High on the turf of a match-up between Getty Images and Yahoo-owned Flickr, IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s Ask.com, a leading search engine, announced that it now powers Photobucket.com, a leading standalone photo and video-sharing site, with its search technology under a new multiyear strategic agreement between the companies, Ask.com said Thursday.
Under the terms of the multi-year deal between Oakland’s Ask.com and Palo Alto-based Photobucket Inc., an online photo sharing site, the Ask.com’s display advertising and paid search ads, based on search terms entered by the user, will now be prominently made visible across Photobucket.com, driving millions of additional Ask.com search queries each month and exposing the Ask.com brand to Photobucket’s 44 million monthly unique users worldwide.
“The deal also contains the syndication of sponsored listings and display advertising to Photobucket.”
Photobucket prominently leads in usage and traffic among image sharing services. People use it to stock-up their images and display them throughout the world of social networking sites like MySpace, and on other places too.
Photobucket, which was acquired by News Corp. in May 2007, is the world’s largest photo sharing site with more than 44 million monthly unique users globally, according to the company.
It reached to fame as the photo-sharing application of choice for users of popular social networking site MySpace, also owned by News Corp. MySpace has more than 110 million users.
“Photobucket has one of the largest online audiences, and now Ask.com provides these consumers with the answers to the questions they ask every day,” said Andrew Moers, Senior Vice President & General Manager, Ask.com Partner Network. “This alliance furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points.”
“Search is the major constituent to the Photobucket experience and we know that our millions of users will benefit from Ask.com’s leading technology,” said Welch, President of Photobucket. “Photobucket users view, store and distribute billions of images each month and Ask.com will serve as a great resource in helping those users find specific content quickly and efficiently.”
Arrivals to the site that are just searching for images have a new option for doing so, one that has been quiet for quite a while. Ask.com picked up a deal to be Photobucket’s search engine of choice; it is on display on Photobucket’s home page right now.
The Photobucket deal is perhaps Ask’s way of showing its hand with regards to a web strategy: get a few significant niche partners and sell all the ads they can for those audiences. Small Ask.com logos now become visible at the top and bottom of most Photobucket Web pages.
The deal will give a boost to Ask, which has a tiny fraction of the online search market when compared with market leaders Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc.
Google signed a related search marketing agreement with MySpace in 2006 for $900 million but Google executives said in February that it has struggled to sell ads on social network sites.
An impending troublemaker may come into play shortly, as Yahoo opened its search index to anyone who wants to build something and hit it via an API.
If Yahoo’s service winds-up with Google’s money machine powering the ad network, Ask could see the window of opportunity for other Photobucket-like deals end up like Alderaan after the Empire dropped by with the Death Star for a test shot.
“Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.”