I had a chance to catch up with Answers Corporation Chief Strategy Officer Bruce Smith recently regarding their recently announced acquisition of Lexico Publishing Group, the publishers of the Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com online portals , for USD 100 million. Lexico's reference portals are fairly simple and undramatic properties, but they have an audience that's about comparable to Answers.com in overall ranking and a footprint in education that offers Answers.com a complementary and loyal footprint. Most importantly Answers.com has been more efficient in being able to extract revenues from its references audiences than Lexico, so it effectively doubles its advertising base for marketing and ecommerce any may come close to doubling its revenues and then some along the way. As with its acquisition of FAQ Farm the Lexico properties are likely to remain autonomous sites, gaining common branding and integration over time but remaining tools that for the time being leverage highly popular bookmarked addresses.

While many magazine publishers are still sniffing around for undervalued print publications to take under their wings this move by Answers.com to scoop up highly ranked but underperforming online sites with complementary advertising bases demonstrates how quickly a highly profitable online site can extend its advertising efficiencies to build profits - even before an ounce of synergy or integration is added. To hearken back to my earlier post on Yahoo's possible sale it's far more likely that media companies that know how to extend advertising synergies online to related online holdings are going to build profitability more quickly than companies looking simply for overall scale of operations.

Labels: advertising, Answers.com, Deals Partnerships and Sales, reference.com

I was very excited to learn about the Answers.com AnswerTips capability a few weeks back but never got around to pushing out the tool to ContentBlogger. Well, in the process of rolling out a template change for ContentBlogger recently to highlight our SIIA 2007 CODiE award for Best Media Blog the AnswerTips feature was pushed out. What does this mean to you? Double-click any word on ContentBlogger and you'll see - you get a little pop-up with a definition for that word and related content links.

The net effect of this tool is a little more clear when you try it a little carelessly. In the example on the left I double-clicked on the word "conversion" and the tool picked out nearby words to provide a definition of the term "cost per conversion." Click on the word "missing" further along and it picks up the word next to it to return the definition for "missing link." Neat. Other words I am less crazy about because they return links to other weblogs and content sources instead of reference content from Answers.com, but if someone is in research mode that's probably a good thing for them. If this were an ad-supported site I'd probably feel somewhat different, though.

Give it a whirl and let us know what you think. The reminder link is at the bottom of each page - we try not to highlight technology partnerships in ContentBlogger to maintain an objective presentation of information - so you'll have to remember that it's there for now. But it's there. Our thanks to Answers.com for a handy tool that's a clever, low-key way to embed value-add content into weblogs.

Labels: Answers.com