IAC sees profit from search engine marketing revenues amid overall loss of $1bn.

10th February 2010 by William Hobson

IAC, the parent company of Ask.com has reported its earnings for fourth quarter 2009.

According to the report, the company saw a 3% increase in profits from search engine marketing revenues. As well as Ask.com, IAC runs PPC advertising and sponsored listings on several other sites. The company’s search division includes CitySearch, Dictionary.com, Match.com and Fun Web Products.

Despite the success of search engine marketing revenues over the last quarter of 2009, overall IAC reported a loss of $1bn. This loss has been attributed to impairment charges incurred by overvaluing the value of shares in IAC. According to Reuters, the company had massively overvalued the value of its search engine marketing portfolio leading to the $1bn write down in Q4 2009.

However, the strong performance of Search over the last quarter has meant IAC beat expectations in the stockmarket by $0.03 according to Search Engine Watch. This marginal success appears to have been favourably received by Wall Street, with IAC stock rising by 4.21% on the day the report was published.

IAC’s relationship with the search engine marketing sector has been the source of much speculation among online commentators, with many people suggesting that Ask.com could be sold off to Microsoft as part of its attempts to build its Bing search engine. Despite Google’s dominance of the search market and the fast growth of Bing, Ask.com still appears among the top 5 search engines in Hitwise and ComScore reports. It represents only a small number of search engine users in comparison to the top three engines (Google, Yahoo and Bing) but it is still seen as a valuable market.

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