Ask Jeeves Acquires eTour Assets

Ask Jeeves Inc., Emeryville, CA, has acquired certain key assets of eTour Inc., a direct marketing and Internet company. Etour retains its debt and technology assets.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The acquisition includes the eTour Web property, with a 4.5 million-name database of registered users. The site was rated the No. 1 site for stickiness in Jupiter Media Metrix April report. It gets 370,000 unique visitors per day.

Also included in the deal are eTour’s Web site delivery engine, which provides users with guided tours of Web sites based on their personal interests. Ask Jeeves also gets proprietary direct e-mail marketing technology with 2.2 million newsletter subscribers and more than 450,000 opt-in special-offer subscribers. Remaining assets are more than 230 vertical Web site “tours”; a registration system, which uses demographic data; and a base of advertisers.

Ask Jeeves said in a statement that the purchase is part of a strategy to expand its targeted advertising products, while providing “a broader set of relevant search results” to Ask Jeeves users. Ask Jeeves hopes the acquisition will help it achieve pro forma profitability by the fourth quarter.