"Jeeves, what happened to your banner ads?"

"Not that I'm complaining, you understand..."

Ask Jeeves is dropping banner ads from its flagship search site and will instead rely on paid sponsorships and other 'targeted' advertising for revenue, the company said on Monday. The search company recently dropped pop-up ads from its site and said the decision to cancel the banner ads is part of a move to provide targeted ad links in search results. "Though we're removing banners from Ask.com, search marketing remains a powerful way to brand products and services online," Steve Berkowitz, president of Ask Jeeves Web properties, said in a release. Banner ads, once the most common method of advertising online, have been falling out of favour for some time. Ask Jeeves said its branded response and premier listings products, which allow sponsors to pay to have their sites promoted on results pages, will be its "core offerings". The company has been working on other ways to boost its presence in the increasingly competitive search engine market, releasing a new search site, dubbed Teoma, in April. But the market still remains largely dominated by Google, which averaged about 8.3 million unique users per day in November, according to comScore Networks. Ask Jeeves averaged about 1.1 million unique users per day in the same period, comScore reported.
Margaret Kane writes for CNET News.com.