Ask Jeeves (ASKJ) on search and advertising (quotes from the conf call)

Here's what Ask Jeeves CEO Steve Berkowits said on ASKJ's Q4 earnings call about the search market, the online advertising market, and his company's strategy:

On the search market

...total queries for the Company were 1.5 billion, up 13% compared to the third quarter and 7.0% compared to the fourth quarter of last year. Driven partially by the holiday season, revenue per thousand queries… on our sites was $43, essentially flat with the prior quarter.

Our proprietary queries were up 19% sequentially and 20% year-over-year and as we look at it, the market’s growing at about 10% in terms of queries.

...if you really look at the proprietary search properties, they grew at a much faster rate than the network properties.

On the online advertising market

...the level of media inventory we have is small compared to some of the
larger players, but we’ve seen firming up of pricing in that
marketplace, for the high value inventory, absolutely. And our sales
reps are continuing to tell us the more inventory we give them in those
high value areas the more they can sell it.

On Ask Jeeves' strategy

We have four initiatives that will drive our growth in 2005:
1. Growing our reach and frequency across all of our properties.
2. Investing in Teoma
3. Building on AJinteractive
4. International expansion

(Quotes from the CCBN StreetEvents transcript.)