Third quarter results for IAC showed some nice results: $1.5 billion in revenue for the period, and adjusted earnings per share of 37 cents. Operating income did drop compared to the same year over year period, to $104 million.

IAC chairman and CEO Barry Diller liked everything he saw, except for the home lending side of his empire.

"With the exception of Lending Tree, this was a satisfactory quarter for IAC. Trends at our businesses are good, and particularly so at HSN, where I believe that Mindy Grossman and her team have now become acclimated and are beginning to demonstrate the great retailing smarts that we knew they were capable of," Diller said in a statement.

IAC places Ask in its Media & Advertising group. That group brought in third quarter revenue of $189.8 million, and operating income of $15.4 million. In 2006, the same quarter saw $135.5 million in revenue and a loss of $2.1 million.

"Within IAC Search & Media, network revenue growth outpaced that of proprietary revenue, primarily due to a wider adoption of syndicated search and sponsored listings products," said IAC. "Ask.com revenue grew, due to an increase in revenue per query and queries."

Analytics firm Compete cited Ask’s search engine market share among US visitors at 3.6 percent for September 2007. That represented a half-percent increase from August.

It’s hard to be a big spender with nothing to spend. Lenders that made loans to risky credit types have been hurt by a massive drop in their industry.

The effects could be felt in the homes of people who have made fortunes off the advertising by subprime lenders. A Financial Times report cited the downturn as affecting two of Nielsen//NetRating’s top ten largest online advertisers: lenders Countrywide and Low Rate Source.

There aren’t any worries being voiced by the search industry yet. Microsoft’s MSN general manager David Jakubowski acknowledged the issues to FT.com, but didn’t express grave concern:

“A lot of the subprime [advertising] has gone away,” said David Jakubowski, general manager of Microsoft’s MSN service.

This loss had yet to have a broader effect in the search business, he added.

“I haven’t felt a pricing hit because of it,” he said. “We haven’t seen anything crazy happen,” though he added that the company continued to keep a close eye on this area for more fallout.

Financial advertising has long represented a lucrative market for paid search and display ads online. A downturn in that spending has been affecting Yahoo since 2006.