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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.

10 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. My predictions by TinBromide · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

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    1. Re:My predictions by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 2, Funny

      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.

      --
      May the Maths Be with you!
    2. Re:My predictions by KiloByte · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Now, please tell me whom the poster of this article works for.

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  2. Re:Compatibility by ack154 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. More competition is good? by pipatron · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

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    1. Re:More competition is good? by MindStalker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  4. 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.

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  5. Quigo's best hope: buyout by a major player? by CodeShark · · Score: 2, Informative
    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?

    --
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  6. 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.