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The Almighty Buck The Internet Businesses Google Yahoo!

An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little 58

Posted by Hemos from the from-the-smallest-mustard-seeds dept.
The Firehose brought us a link from the NYTimes about Quigo. As the Times feed says: "Yahoo and Google are facing a challenge from a tiny adversary named Quigo Technologies over contextual text ads online." And while obviously not in the same financial league, it is good to see more competition in this space.
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An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little More

An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little

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  • My predictions (Score:4, Funny)

    by TinBromide ( 921574 ) on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:20AM (#18152408)
    5% This upstart stands a chance and gains market/mind share
    25% They get bought up by a google competitor like msn or yahoo
    20% They get bought up by google itself
    50% The slashdot posts about this upstart will cause an increase in popularity and then bring their main servers to its knees trying to keep up with all the revenue free hits.

    My other prediction? Apple rolls out an ad service called iPimp, hires Al gore and claims it invented the internet advertisement, the internet, and the advertisement.
    • Your post fails to account for the 95% chance that the entrenched players will use their patent leverage to crush the upstart. After all, competition is for communists.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by KiloByte ( 825081 )
      Now, please tell me whom the poster of this article works for.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by exell ( 1065256 )
      nothing to add, just thought the comment was great, sums up my sentiments exactly, but I thought IPimp was an up and coming feature to .Mac, bringing sexless mac geeks to reasonably priced women across the globe, with the simplicity and ease of use we come to expect of all Ilife programs ;)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by laffer1 ( 701823 )
      Al Gore is already on the board at apple.

      http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/bod.html [apple.com]

  • More competition is good? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pipatron ( 966506 ) <pipatron@gmail.com> on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:28AM (#18152488) Homepage

    it is good to see more competition in this space

    Somehow I don't agree here. *gee* it would really rock if all ads were completely *free* so that there can be an infinite amount of ads on the internet!

    • Re:More competition is good? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MindStalker ( 22827 ) <mindstalker@@@gmail...com> on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:33AM (#18152540) Journal
      Strangely enough advertising is one of those things no one not even the buyer wants to be free. If it is free there are two many ads and no one pays attention to your ad. Advertisers understand this and would refuse to buy from an advertising company where the ads were too cheap or there were simply too many ads.
    • I guess Quigo's approach to this means I will be able to earn less from the ad blocks I place on some of my websites.

      Quigo allows the advertisers to choose which sites they want to have their ads on and where to bid the prices up, that is an advantage to the bigger players and a disadvantage for the smaller sites. No two players are going to bid each other up for being places on my little website whereas they might bid each other up for some kind of keyword where I am also represented.

      I may be wrong though,

  • Love to see a viable AdWords competitor... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:39AM (#18152612)
    As a long-time Google customers, I can tell you I'd love to see a viable AdWords competitor. Specifically, the AdWords "affiliate" program sucks: Google won't tell you which sites you are advertised on and certainly doesn't give you the ability to say "I really don't want my product/service advertised on site X, Y or Z". Also, Google's trademark name policies are really bizarre: sometimes you can protect your own name, sometimes you can't. Other times someone will convince Google that a phrase widely used in the industry is a "trademark" and lock out all other industry competitors.

    Unfortunately, the ads are going to continue to be sold by the search engines themselves for as far out as I can see, so it's tough to say if these guys will get any of my business.

    • Re:Love to see a viable AdWords competitor... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Monday February 26, 2007 @10:55AM (#18152786) Homepage
      AdSense isn't all that either.

      One of the prominent google ads on my site linked to a page on EBay which contained illegal copies of my commercial software product.

      Don't bother e-mailing EBay about such things either, not even using their Vero program. They ignore everything except legal threats.

      Luckily AdSense allows to block specific domains and a filter for EBay was apparently common enough to find on the internet.
    • Google ... certainly doesn't give you the ability to say "I really don't want my product/service advertised on site X, Y or Z".

      Campaign Summary > [Campaign Name] > Site Exclusion

      • Campaign Summary > [Campaign Name] > Site Exclusion


        Remember, that doesn't help unless you know where your ads are. This "feature" is putting the cart before the horse - you can't really start the day saying, "I want to make sure my ad doesn't end up on porn sites" unless you have a tool to tell you which porn sites your ad is listed on.
        • Referrer logs can help you to some extent with the "where are my ads being placed" question. You an figure out which of those referred clicks are coming via ads by use of a URL parameter in the URL you ask Google to redirect ad clicks to.

          Also (and now I'm just getting pedantic) I believe pr0n sites are not included in Google's program as per their TOS, but I'll grant it's simple enough to come up with trivial variations on this theme.

          But all of this is a tempest in a teapot. While Google thinks I'm pa

          • Referrer logs can help you to some extent

            I know, but that should be Google's job. That's why they "suck"...

            While Google thinks I'm paying for "click-throughs", I'll tell you that in the end I judge my participation in Adwords by whether it makes money. How much does a month cost--and how many (say) rentals of the art fair equipment I rent out bring? I'm just not that fussy about how they deliver the goods, and I think the danger of my ads being run on sites that would "hurt my business" is negligible.

            In bi

            • Long story short, Google affiliate advertising isn't a good use of our advertising dollar. We prefer to spend on better targeted opportunities that earn us more qualified leads.

              And more power to you for that.

        • Just come up with a list of porn sites - How many porn sites could there possibly be on the internet?

  • Different market (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Quigo is in a different market. They show ads only on selected high profile, high traffic websites, whereas Google shows ads on millions of websites, huge and small. That's Google's bet: It's best to produce value from the masses of information, not from handpicked excerpts. So far they're looking good.
    • You make an interesting observation - but compare the revenue from a select few targeted high traffic websites to the unwashed masses and their stream of revenue. Which is more in line with the traditional and successful advertising formulas (used by TV, newspaper, etc)? Personally, every time I see a googlevert it feels like walking by a hodgepodge mess of papers stapled to a telephone pole.

      I felt empathy for the gentleman above this post (mwvdlee) who mentioned adSense linking to illegal copies of his c
    • As an advertiser, I only care about "high profile, high traffic" websites. That's why I spend with Google and Yahoo's search engine ad programs and don't bother with anyone else. Google's "affliate" program is useless (see my previous post about that), so if Quigo really does make itself a doorway to a significant portion of "high profile, high traffic", I may cut back on Google and send dollars Quigo's way instead.

      (If Google's model really is to provide ad content for tiny sites - I'm out!)
  • Looks just like AdBrite.com with a different skin to me... nothing to see here... move along.

  • Wow, to add your site to publish they ask if it's or not over the million visits a month, a pretty high number if you ask me.

    If your web is more modest you'd better go with text link ads [text-link-ads.com].

    --
    Great hosting [dreamhost.com] 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
    • --
      Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95

      Bonus points for using a proper sig delimiter (to the extent it's meaningful anywhere outside an email or news client), but I'd like to think many of choose not to be subjected to advertising by
      disabling sigs [slashdot.org].

      The tricky part is getting users to use the system correctly and put their pithy quote of the day, advocacy announcement, or advertising plug where it belongs [slashdot.org].

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ibjhb ( 173533 )
      Convenient you put your referral id in there...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Raenex ( 947668 )
      So is all this advertising and referral link crap working out for you, or are you doing stuff like this for $5 a month?
  • For the sake of discussion, let's assume that Quigo's technology does create an effective ad-words competitor. If it doesn't make it into mainstream use, it doesn't matter, and without a major player such as Yahoo behind it, I frankly don't see how the "newly" available solution gets funded.


    For example, assume I start up a brand new, state of the art TV channel -- but don't have much money to advertise it, don't have much money to hire professional marketing and sales pros to build a revenue stream. Also assume that if my channel succeeds, I take money from the big network channels in my area. Do you realistically think that the main channels (including cable) really want to help me get a leg up?

    Then compare what happens if a well known VC with many many clients backs my new channel, funds a well-crafted sales and marketing campaign, advises his clients to use my new channel, etc.

    Which do you think is more likely to succeed?

  • Project Wonderful [projectwonderful.com] - they have image-based advertising and are currently all over the comic book and game websites. The revenue passed through them is really unbelievable and they are working on a bidding model - you bid on when you want your ad to appear and you manage your ads yourself. So if, say a new blog post is released, you want your ad up then; you bid it up, but only for that time period. You don't pay for any advertising time that you are not displayed. It seems to be an extremely "fair" model.
    • Ah, yes, that's also from the guy from qwantz.com [slashdot.org] isn't it. I like the idea, but it's fairly new, I wonder how well it's working already. I'd like to use that system, but don't have a site in the cartoon-region, that might make it a bit more difficult to get the right banners, or to use this to place my banners. It will be more useful as it grows and grows, though.
  • Marty Abbot is the COO of Quigo. He was previously the VP tech for eBay. That information alone is enough to make sure that I will not willingly be one their customers this side of the Great Hades Freeze.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Raenex ( 947668 )
      Though by linking Quigo to Ebay you are probably raising the credibility of Quigo, not hurting it. Having a link to a successful, big name player can only help them, not hurt.
  • I've always hoped for a competitor of Google, which gives my little website more money per click than Google. But from TFA, Quigo seems to be geared toward catering to big media and big websites (e.g. ESPN.com). No interest by me.
  • ESPN may be a high profile site, but that doesn't mean all their pages are worth advertising on.

    They've got millions of pages of garbage like this:

    http://search.espn.go.com/keyword/search?src=bowlf ull&page=sponsored&searchString=Detroit+flights [go.com]

    For some reason, Google actually indexes this crap, and it ranks fairly well.
  • With all these "startup contextual ad providers" google must be shitting themnselves.
    Either that or they, Like the rest of us, Know that if the thousands of other contextual ad startups didn't dent the industry, Neither will this one.
  • For those of you asking about funding for this it appears GlenRock Israel [grg.co.il] has a substantial stake in it if not ownership of it. At work so can't look much deeper right now/verify it.
  • And thats about it. They don't make much off of it either.

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