Quigo on the NY Times

NY Times has published a nice story about Quigo this morning. From it:

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.

And Google’s response:

In response to further questions about Quigo, though, Google said it was prepared to make changes to its AdSense service that mimicked Quigo’s approach, an unusual step for a company accustomed to mapping the terrain in every aspect of its business.

In the next few months, Google’s advertiser reports will begin listing the sites where each ad runs, Ms. Malone said. She added that advertisers on the Google networks would soon be able to bid on contextual ads on particular Web sites rather than simply buying keywords that appeared across Google’s entire network.

Full story here. You can Digg the story here.

I think it’s inevitable that Google and Yahoo will allow CPC bidding by publisher. Advertisers simply don’t trust the quality of their contextual networks, being that they are so full of spam, parked domains, and other wonderful sources of “quality” traffic.

Quigo’s AdSonar site-specific bidding was not designed as an advertiser filter for junk sites. AdSonar is a platform designed for premium publishers who want to own their advertising assets and don’t want to outsource that asset to their biggest competitors (=Google, Yahoo and MSN). A side-benefit of this, is that advertisers on the AdSonar network get to bid only on well-known, high-quality, brand name premium publishers. No spam blogs, no parked domains, no fraudulent publisher rings, no other monkey business.

A site-specific bidding filter will be a welcome tool for advertisers looking to filter junk traffic from their AdSense/YPN ad buys. But it is not in any way an alternative for an end-to-end publisher-centric platform for those publishers looking to own and manage their advertiser relationships. Until Google and Yahoo decide to completely drop their own content plays, Quigo’s AdSonar is the only viable solution for brand-name publishers.

More coverage: Greg Sterling, Slashdot, JenSense, eWeek, Merc, John Battelle, and others.