InterActiveCorp subsidiary Ask.com has signed a deal to become the official search engine for the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR).  Ask.com wants to push their brand in front of the second-most popular professional sport on TV.  NASCAR has about 75 million fans that purchase $3 billion in licensed products.

The financial details of the deal was not disclosed.  Jim Safka, CEO of Ask.com said that the goal of the deal is to have NASCAR fans use their search engine to look up information about NASCAR.  Ask.com will run the search engine on the NASCAR website and will also make a “NASCAR toolbar” for those users.  Ask will offer detail searches of NASCAR’s databases and the two companies will be showing display Ask.com ads at the races.

Ask.com sponsors the No. 96 Ford car driven by Bobby Labonte as part of a pact with the Hall of Fame racing.  The Ask.com Ford car will drive in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series as well.

“NASCAR fans are the most sponsor-loyal fan base in sports,” stated Ask.com spokesperson Andrea Riggs. “NASCAR fans appreciate the companies who support the sport they love and who enable the teams to keep racing.”

Funny or Die, the video web site that focuses around a slapstick genre has a new CEO. The new CEO is Dick Glover and he is the former Vice President of NASCAR. Glover helped market NASCAR to go Hollywood through the form of the movie, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Will Ferrell and Adam McKay wrote Talladega Nights and also co-founded Funny or Die together.

Funny or Die is backed with over $15 million, mostly from Sequoia and has really been pumping out some funny videos lately. Some of the videos that I enjoyed recently on Funny or Die includes a that parodies Al Sharpton’s opposition of rap music videos starring Li’l Jon and a video that makes fun of Jamie Lynn Spears’ pregnancy by using a toddler to play Spears.

Correction: The below paragraph can be scratched out (see comment).  I just learned that Dick Glover did have an Internet background: he started ESPN.com in 1994.  ESPN.com is ranked #44 on Alexa today. 

Placing a CEO that has a limited Internet background could be risky, but at the same time has its pluses. During Terry Semel’s tenure as the CEO of Yahoo!, the company started making some value-added acquisitions such as Flickr and Del.icio.us, but passed on some potentially major acquisitions such as Google. Semel didn’t have an Internet background because he had just previously worked as the CEO of Warner Brothers for 24 years. However, lack of experience could catch up with you as displayed in the reasons why Semel started losing his flair as the CEO of Yahoo!, due to reasons such as Google’s sudden dominance in the search market.

Regardless, I see Funny or Die doing well. But the only way to keep it going is if they retain the talent that they have now. The company wouldn’t be where it is today without Ferrell or McKay.