Nice piece on contextual ad provider Quigo in today’s NYT.
What Quigo offers is transparency and control in what can often be an opaque business: advertisers pay Yahoo and Google for contextual ad placement on a wide variety of Web pages, but get little say over where those ads run or even a list of sites where they do appear.
Quigo, by contrast, gives advertisers not only the list of specific sites where their ads have appeared but also the opportunity to buy only on specific Web sites or particular pages on those sites. It also allows media company sites like ESPN.com and FoxNews.com a chance to manage their own relationships with advertisers.
Although Quigo remains a small competitor, with less than 10 percent of the contextual ad business, its growing success has apparently persuaded Google, which is accustomed to calling the shots in all aspects of its business, that it has to change the way it sells the sponsored link ads in the future.
The key here is that in fact, Google *is* changing how it sells, and is pushing site specific and other approaches through its Adsense network. While direct response advertisers may not care about this, brand advertisers do, and it’s those advertisers that Google is now going after…
Also – check out what Google continues to do in video, also in the NYT
Having used Quigo in the past to actually purchase advertising space all I can say is I hope their performance is better now – I ran an aggressive campaign for a client and saw the worst conversion rate I have ever seen on contextual ads (which are bad to start with)…
In the early days, Quigo’s AdSonar was an open-for-all-publishers platform, and admittedly it suffered from some traffic quality problems at the time. Since then we’ve re-positioned the platform to cater exclusively to high(est)-quality, brand-name premium publishers and today I believe our network has the highest quality mix of publishers in this space. This obviously doesn’t guarantee a high ROI for all advertisers… but with the quality of the sites in our network and with the full transparency we give advertisers, we offer advertisers the best (by far) starting point for achieving superior ROI.
I chatted with Preston, and it seems like his experience with Quigo has been in the very early days, before we switched to our premium publisher focus, and before we offered advertisers the levels of transparency we do today. His comment should be taken with that perspective in mind.