SEO Articles

Visit Rank for $ales

Read my bio

email me

Home

My 2 featured articles for the week ending Dec. 16, 2005:

Archived blogs for the week of December 19, 2005

1068 - December 20, 2005 - 2.31 PM EST

Ask Jeeves wants to grow its staff by 20 percent

Ask Jeeves' CEO Steve Berkowitz wants to increase the staff at its search engine by about 20 percent in 2006. Currently, Ask Jeeves employs 650 people.

The expansion will come as the company delivers solid gains in traffic but remains overshadowed by its more famous and much larger rivals. IAC shares are down 10 percent for 2005. The search company has a storied history. Ask Jeeves shares quadrupled on their first day of trading in 1999, only to crash when the Internet bubble burst.

Now the company, which became part of New York-based IAC in a $1.9 billion deal completed in July, is expanding both its operations center and its corporate headquarters staff. With Internet advertising surging in popularity, Berkowitz is trying to carve out a niche for the 9-year-old search engine, with or without its butler mascot Jeeves.

Posted on Businessblog™

1067 - December 19, 2005 - 2.52 PM EST

Google to acquire a 5 percent stake in AOL

Google is expected to acquire a five percent stake in AOL for a sum of about $1 billion. This acquisition could possibly give Google access to coveted content assets from Time Warner.

Although the terms of the transaction aren't finalized yet, this is interesting. Quoted from the New York Times: "Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before".

In 2004, AOL earned about $300 million from revenue share payments related to clicks on Google PPC ads shown on AOL search results pages. The original merger between Time Warner and AOL was worth approximately $163 billion (combined value of the companies at the time).

This investment, if extrapolated, would value AOL at $20 billion today. At today’s market close, Time Warner’s market cap was approximately $84 billion, while Google’s was roughly $127 billion. This deal represents something of an easier “integration” than a joint venture with Microsoft would have been.

Here’s what the Wall Street Journal (sub req’’d)said earlier today about the terms and implications of the deal: The deal would help Google sell more of the display ads that run on some of the Web sites affiliated with Google.

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2005. All rights reserved.

All views and opinions expressed on this blog are those of Serge Thibodeau only and are not representative of any company listed. All slogans, trademarks, text or logo representation used or referred to on this blog are the property of their respective owners.