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Search and ad deal land Ask on picture site

A bright spot for Ask.com emerged with news of a partnership with image sharing service Photobucket.

Among image sharing services, Photobucket ranks among the leaders in usage and traffic. People use it to store images and display them throughout the world of social networking sites like MySpace, and on other places too.

Arrivals to the site who are just looking for images have a new option for doing so, one that's been quiet for quite a while. Ask.com picked up a deal to be Photobucket's search engine of choice; it's on display on Photobucket's home page right now.

The deal includes more than the search box on Photobucket. Ask.com said in a statement they picked up the syndication of sponsored listings and display advertising for Photobucket in the partnership too.

That could add up nicely for Ask, as Photobucket enjoys traffic of some 44 million uniques per month by comScore Media Metrix's rankings. Ask.com Partner Network executive Andrew Moers sais the deal "furthers our strategy to bring Ask.com to consumers worldwide through a broad range of Internet access points."

Back at the end of March, we talked with Ask.com about their strategy as they moved forward from a reorganization that saw people like CEO Jim Lanzone and director of information services Gary Price exit the search engine. Search pundits from Danny Sullivan on down found little to encourage their thoughts of Ask in the wake of those changes.

The Photobucket agreement may be Ask's way of showing its hand with regards to a web strategy: get a few significant niche partners and sell all the ads they can for those audiences. A potential dampener may come into play shortly, as Yahoo opened its search index to anyone who wants to build something and hit it via an API.

Yahoo doesn't have the monetization side available yet, which gives Ask a little window to make Photobucket-type deals. If Yahoo's service ends up with Google's money machine powering the ad network, Ask could see the window of opportunity for other Photobucket-like deals end up like Alderaan after the Empire dropped by with the Death Star for a test shot.