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An Ad Upstart Forces Google to Open Up a Little

Posted by Hemos on 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.

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Love to see a viable AdWords competitor... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Love to see a viable AdWords competitor... by mwvdlee · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  2. You know what's really good? by JoshDM · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.