AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Search Engine Land

In a move that is interesting and perhaps even surprising for several reasons, IAC/Ask is buying Lexico Publishing Group, which owns and operates “iconic” domains Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. These sites get most of their traffic through direct navigation and will increase Ask’s reach by 145 million unduplicated users (or 11 percent). Ask is saying this will make it the ninth most visited property online, ahead of Facebook.

There was a deal on the table to buy Lexico last year from Answers.com, but it fell through. Answers was partly trying to buy Dictionary.com’s direct traffic.
That deal was valued at $100 million, so one might assume that Ask is paying something near that. However Ask representatives would not reveal the price of this deal, but they said that, as a public company, it wouldn’t have any material impact on revenues, which would otherwise trigger disclosure of the purchase price.
I was told that the second most popular query on Ask in 2007 was “dictionary.” Ask said, accordingly, one of the reasons this deal makes a lot of sense is because of the popularity of “reference searches” on Ask. Another is just the huge traffic volumes on the Lexico sites.

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