for W3c validation

The New York Times has a great article about Quigo Technologies, a company I didn’t know existed even though they now serve the text ads on ESPN.com. Here’s a bit about Quigo –

Founded in 2000, Quigo provides innovative, performance-based marketing solutions that achieve superior results for premium-branded websites and advertisers. ROI-based solutions for content-targeted advertising and search marketing form the foundation of Quigo’s product offerings.

The company is trying to take market share away from Google in the battle for the contextual text ad market. How are they competing with Google? Well, by being transparent. Frankly, I’m amazed Google has gotten away with not telling their advertisers which sites their ads are displayed on for so long. There are thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of sites displaying Google ads – but as an advertiser, there’s no way to tell which sites your ads are appearing on. It’s pretty obvious advertisers are willing to pay more for an ad on a site like CNN than on, say, Fred’s News Blog. Quigo is bringing transparency to text advertising — and as a result, Google is going to start showing its advertisers the same type of data in a couple months. It’ll be interesting to see how much traction Quigo gets — it’s great to see some serious competition for Google (and Yahoo!).

There’s plenty of links to other posts covering the subject at Techmeme if you’re interested in reading more.

A take away is this: if part of your business model relies on hiding data from customers, you might as well start giving customers access to the data they want — or someone else will.