Should Ask Serve Ads for BitTorrent?
The blogs and the news sites have been buzzing about the recent news that Ask Jeeves is to provide the PPC ads for the new BitTorrent search engine.
The controversy comes in, when you look at what BitTorrent does for a living. Basically, BitTorrent uses peer-to-peer technology to "give you the same freedom to publish previously enjoyed by only a select few with special equipment and lots of money." Or BitTorrent, also, allows you to easily download the latest Star Wars movie.
A thread at WebmasterWorld named AskJeeves in Ad Distribution Partnership with BitTorrent, asks the question...Does Ask Jeeves want to serve up sponsored ads for searches on keyword phrases like pirated star wars movie, software serial numbers and so on? As you can imagine, this goes to the heart of many freedom of speech types.
The question at heart is, is this good for the Ask Jeeves brand?
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rustybrick in Ask.com at May 27, 2005 9:12 AM
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First, I think it's risky for Ask Jeeves. You look at Yahoo!'s innovative partnerships with sites like Grokker and Wikipedia, which are brilliant moves. BitTorrent's a huge risk. And I think when marketers make sense of all this, they're going to demand greater control over where their ads appear - control that search engines are wary of releasing.
Posted by David Berkowitz at May 27, 2005 10:00