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.
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.