Quigo and AdSonar – A Formidable Opponent to Google & Yahoo?
by Ryan - September 19th, 2006 3:31 pm
At first glance I didn’t give Quigo much thought… in hindsight however, I see that there may be a little more than meets the eye with this company. Ironically enough, CNN Money.com ran a story today on this exact subject entitled “Quigo: The Next Google?”
At first glance, Quigo looks to be another ad serving platform running on the conventional model of contextual advertsing. There’s a lot of companies popping up in this space, so why is Quigo any different from the rest of them who’ve only seen small amounts of success?
The answer to that question lies in its AdSonar product. AdSonar is Quigo’s version of AdSense (for Google) and Content Match (for Yahoo)… But contrary to the other small ad serving platforms, some really big names actually do use AdSonar as their preferred monetization system, or are switching to it. Most notably, in the coming months, ESPN.com will be switching from Yahoo’s Content Match to AdSonar. But why the switch? As noted by the reporter in the article above, the product isn’t that much better than the big boys version… The ads were a bit more relevant, but not so much to call for a switch in models. SO… what’s the real reason?
As also mentioned in the article above… Quigo is NOT a threat to large-scale content providers, while Google and Yahoo certainly are. What do I mean by a threat? Well, Yahoo is a large-scale content provider itself. As of the latest reports, Yahoo is still the most viewed destination on the web (although just barely edging out MySpace). Within the Yahoo domain, one can find a plethora of information and potentially have no need to ever visit something like an ESPN.com. This, is a direct threat to the ESPN.com business model. But ESPN is a television station first and foremost, so let’s look at something a little more traditional. The real threat is focused at those Old Media Stallwarts, aka, the News Papers and other News outlets… Ever since the internet became a one stop destination for free news and effective advertising, readership among the most dominant publications has declined. Ad revenue is shrinking and people in ‘the old’ industry are panicking.
Because of this, some pretty common sense thought might bring the people in charge of a CNN.com to say, “Hey… we can get the same ad serving model and payoff from Quigo, who is not a direct threat to our business. Why are we sharing revenue with Google or Yahoo?”
To be honest, I don’t know why they are paying Google or Yahoo, and essentially building their businesses stronger… I’d rather go with Quigo, too.
technorati tags: quigo | adsonar
Related posts:
- Yahoo Site Explorer The latest innovation to site search organization has come from...
- Google Finance Looks Slick For years something has been missing from Google’s world of...
- Men Are From Google, Women Are From Yahoo I just received an email from WebProNews.com that had some...
- Google Base “Google Base” is what it’s being called initially, and what...
- No Longer Speculation – Google Base is now in Beta Beware Craig’s List.. and maybe even eBay if this thing...
