Benin Brown: Rushmore Drive: The end of a dream?

June 13, 2009

Rushmore Drive: The end of a dream?

12:06 AM |

Posted by Benin |

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A very sad ending to an ambitious dream...Over a year ago the Rushmore Drive launched as a search engine geared towards African Americans. A primary aim of the company was to capitalize on online search dollars driven by African American consumers. Yesterday the company officially closed its doors.

From Rushmore Drive:

"RushmoreDrive is now closed. Thank you for allowing us to be part of this great and loyal community over the past year.

We at RushmoreDrive believed passionately in providing a deep, rich and unique experience and are proud to have been able to serve your online search and networking needs. Fourteen months and over 7.5 million visitors later, thank you for helping us change the way our community drives the web.

As we come to the end of the RushmoreDrive chapter, we hope you had a gratifying experience. Thank you all for coming along for the drive!"

Black Web 2.0 writes:

"The closure will affect 17 employees, and according to an IAC spokesperson was due in “part of their continued effort to rationalize the IAC emerging business.”

Although this is the end for Rushmore Drive, I do not think that it signifies the end of an African American digital ad space. In contrast to the main stream ad industry the scale and metrics afforded by digital technology make it much easier for companies looking to penetrate this audience. And so long as this is the case there will always be the need for insight and interpretation of the numbers.

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