Slashdot Mirror
An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little
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.
Curious how their website doesn't work in firefox
http://www.quigo.com/
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.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
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!
c++;
http://news.google.com/news?q=Quigo
all there is in the news about this "upstart" company are self-made press releases and PR fluff, nothing at all about Google and competition (except this Slashdot article) and how much of an impact they are making in the contextual text ad market space (which is very crowded as it is)
seems NYTimes fell for the "PR as news" gag and Slashdot has repeated it (not that we care as we hate any adverts)
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.
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.
Looks just like AdBrite.com with a different skin to me... nothing to see here... move along.
--- http://www.keything.com
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.
--
Great hosting 200GB Storage, 2_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95
means more click fraud payouts and Profit! Is America a great country or what$$!
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?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
Project Wonderful - 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.
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, there might be flowing more cash into the contextual ad business if advertisers are given more control over which ads are places where and that even though it will mean more income for the big sites it might also mean more income for me.
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.
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.
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 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.
I'm a nature photographer.
I know, but that should be Google's job. That's why they "suck"...
In bigger businesses (like mine) you'll find that VIEW_AD vs. CLICK vs. TRY vs. BUY "conversion" rates are carefully monitored. When we've opened up a few ads to "affiliates", nearly every time total VIEW_ADs shot up, total CLICKs shot up too (thus increasing Google's revenue) but the TRY and BUY rates on "from affiliate" viewers plummetted.
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.
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!)
And more power to you for that.
I'm a nature photographer.
Just come up with a list of porn sites - How many porn sites could there possibly be on the internet?
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.
I am waiting for an Ad stock market where ads can be negotiated in a marketplace and you can put your own Google/Yahoo ad system.
The company I work for just launched a new service in this arena, as well. We offer contextual AND in-line advertising. Check it out: http://www.thundertext.com/
I'm a web developer, and the site I work at, that shall remain nameless, is a customer of Quigo's. We display their ads.
First off, I feel that a good portion of the people at Quigo, after having spoke to them, are idiots. Let's just say they don't communicate very well, and leave it at that.
Second, they claim to be selling contextual ads. They are not contextual ads. There is no code in their script that determines which ads they show based on the context of the page. This is something Google AdSense does, and does fairly well. Quigo ads are targeted by section specific ad placements. For example, if you read a story about the Superbowl just before the game took place at ESPN.com, you would have seen ads for both cities of the teams in the game, and ads for tickets. This would appear to be context based, but it really isn't. It's only content based in so much that someone at ESPN.com went into their Quigo account and created an ad placement for the 2007 Super Bowl, and then people bought ads to display in that section. Looking at ESPN.com's site, they must have a placement set up for every single major sports team, and a lot more. Setting up these placements is very time consuming when doing lots of them. I work at a small to large site, and we have about 45 different placements. I can't imagine how many ESPN.com may have. I'm guessing over a thousand, which means well over a thousand man-hours just to set up.
Also, what their paying to put ads on websites is really not enough for the work they require.
Just my two cents.
Aero
ESPN may be a high profile site, but that doesn't mean all their pages are worth advertising on.
f ull&page=sponsored&searchString=Detroit+flights
They've got millions of pages of garbage like this:
http://search.espn.go.com/keyword/search?src=bowl
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.
God Be Gone
For those of you asking about funding for this it appears GlenRock Israel has a substantial stake in it if not ownership of it. At work so can't look much deeper right now/verify it.
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
In the end the quigo ads were the better performing in terms of number of clicks they could generate, but they also cost more per click.
The first issue that is clear to me is that Quigo's advertiser system sucks compared to google's. They just aren't in the same league of usability or targetting.
The other issue is that Quigo's CTRs were attrocious. Most of the time Quigo gave about 1 click per 10k impressions whereas the same ad on adwords generated maybe 1 click per 350 impressions.
Now I am comparing apples and oranges, since in google we were much better targeted to people looking for what we were providing (and we only tried advertising on search). Quigo didn't seem to have that flexibility and acts much more like a print newspaper ad.
As an Ad buyer I couldn't care less, but if google can get their sale with 350 impressions but quigo needs 30 times that then I'd have to say that google has the better long term model.
I think we agree...o ld=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=18154654#181549 70
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=224172&thresh
And thats about it. They don't make much off of it either.