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.

Comments

Re:Compatibility

[ack154]

Turn off adblock. It looks like if you have any of the adblock subscriptions the entire site is blocked. I just checked the "blockable items" list for the site and EVERYTHING was red.

Works fine after that.

Different market

[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.

Quigo's best hope: buyout by a major player?

[CodeShark]

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?