Category: Quigo

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.

Seth Godin (a WebX.0 favorite!) responds to the NY Times piece on Quigo today with all fair points:

If you’re running a pay per click ad designed to support a cost-per-acquisition strategy, (Google AdWords, et.al.) then does it matter where your ad runs?

Remember, the point of the ad is to get someone to click (that’s what you’re charged for…  the click) and then the goal of the site is to convert that click into permission and eventually a customer.

So, does it matter where the ad runs if it works?

From the marketer’s perspective, I agree 100% with Seth on this point – if (and that’s a huge IF… [1]) the campaign works, and the ROI is good, it’s insignificant where the traffic came from. But while advertisers may not care where they get their clicks from
them, they certainly do adjust their bids to account for the mix of
high-quality clicks and spam/fraud/foreign/etc clicks.

What happens in essence, is that the premium publishers in this mix are
getting lower bids than they should have, while the low quality traffic
sites get higher bids than they would have had they sold to advertisers directly [2].

Now, while Quigo caters to both marketers and publishers, we view our platform primarily as a publisher solution. We offer it as a private label to publishers, and let them acquire and manage their advertisers through it. It’s the publishers who we see benefiting most from the AdSonar solution, with marketers benefiting as a result of our insistence on catering only to the highest quality publishers in the country.

The TV network example is not applicable to our space… Unlike any advertising medium in the past, we don’t (nor do our publishers) determine the pricing of the media sold. That is determined by the marketers, and therefore it generally reflects the value the marketers get from the media they’re bidding for. The fact of the matter is, that marketers are willing to bid higher for a site with quality, US-based, non-fraudulent, non-spam, non-accidental-traffic traffic than they are willing to bid for that same site combined with 100,000 other lesser quality sites.

And that, publishers really care about.

 

[1] The Big Co‘s mix into their traffic a bunch of awful sources (misspelled domain names, spam blogs, etc, etc). They can get away with this to some extent because the junk traffic is mixed and diluted with the quality traffic on their network and search destinations…

[2] Google’s SmartPricing does mitigate this issue a little, but it certainly does not come close to solving this issue. When junk sites are part of the mix, and they’re getting paid something, someone is bearing that cost and that’s the marketers…