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.
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?
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.
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.
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.