A couple of months ago The New York Times published a story about Quigo (disclosure: a company I co-founded). A couple of highlights:
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…
…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.
Looks like the NYT nailed it. Today Google started following Quigo’s lead on becoming a more transparent network. More about this by John Battelle, Barry Schwartz, SEW, and Mashable.
From what I can tell, the Google implementation is more lip service than a real way for advertisers to buy placements on specific publishers. That is to be expected. AdSense would not be successful if it weren’t fundamentally a blind network. Google takes a small number of loss leader sites like Ask.com and AOL on which it makes little or no money. Those are thrown into the blind mix to keep the overall blended-average quality of traffic reasonable. But Google makes its real AdSense money on the very long tail of crappy/fraudulent/parked-domain/self-clicking/link-farm/etc websites. Those are the sites that advertisers would never ever bid for if they had the choice. Those are also the sites that Google can take whatever % of the revenue they see fit (which I estimate at 50% at least) because they never tell long tail publishers how much they pay out.
That’s where Google’s true money pot is, and if they remove their network’s opacity and truly allow advertisers to bid transparently for specific sites – all that revenue will go away.
This new report is definitely a welcome change for Google advertisers. Even lip service is a form of service, I guess… But don’t hold your breath for any genuine effort from Google on making its network truly transparent as long as it makes so much money by having advertisers bid blindly on sites they’d never want to be placed on. For true transparency your only choice is still Quigo’s AdSonar.