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