The NAA (Newspaper Association of America) recently published a very interesting paper titled: "Getting Serious About Search: Online Newspapers’ Response to Google".
The full report is available on their site, but is available only to registered NAA members. Here are a few interesting nuggets relating to Quigo mentioned in a press release we issued yesterday:
"…For these newspapers, contextual affiliate advertising program options were nearly half as numerous as the number of total replies and included J Carte Marketing, ContextWeb, Quigo, Planet Discover, topix.net, Kontera, IndustryBrains’ sponsored links program (in conjunction with Quigo’s keyword program), Burst Media’s AdConductor program and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Among respondents, Quigo was employed separately and also paired with PlanetDiscover, Kontera and IndustryBrains. Quigo easily took the category, having affiliations with half the respondents."
…One executive, while interested in exploring opportunities to engage Google, is taking a pragmatic approach:
“We use Quigo for one simple reason. Quigo offers a white-label product that we can sell and manage directly the relationships with our customers. We set the terms of our engagement.”
Another board member is running his own internal test with different properties on either Quigo or AdSense to see which one outperforms the other. He explained, “We took this route because we believe it’s very important to own the relationship with our advertisers. By using Google, the relationship is between Google and the advertiser. We value the opportunities to up-sell our current customers and assist them with the best online ad buys in our marketplace.”
As I said in the past: A media company outsourcing its ad sales, is like a restaurant shutting down its kitchen and outsourcing the food part of the business to McDonalds. Nice to see that the newspapers are starting to understand this threat and responding to it before McGoogle eats their business.