Web X.0

Time Inc switches to Quigo

Earlier today we (=Quigo) announced together with Time Inc a broad, exclusive, 3-year agreement to use Quigo's AdSonar for auction-based text link advertising on Time Inc websites. More coverage on this on the Quigo Blog. This deal is estimated to be worth north of $100M over the next 3 years.

This deal covers all of Time's leading online properties: Time.com, CNNMoney.com, People.com, EW.com, InStyle.com, SI.com, Golf.com, FanNation.com, SouthernLiving.com, SouthernAccents.com, Sunset.com, CottageLiving.com, CoastalLiving.com, CookingLight.com, MyRecipes.com and others in the future

If the publisher has the ability to attract advertisers directly, whether by having a great brand, and/or highly targeted audience, and/or a direct sales force (and Time Inc has all 3), it makes no sense to use a black-box solution like Google's AdSense for placement of ads. As I said a while back - that would be like a classy restaurant outsourcing it's kitchen to McDonalds... ;-)

There's definitely a trend going on here where more and more premium publishers are starting to understand this:
You can either take ads that were bidded to an ad network that has a blind mix of some good sites and lots of crappy ones (spammy/fraudulent/domain parked). In these blind networks, advertisers don’t really have the ability to choose which sites they’re on or optimize their bids for the quality of your traffic. Oh, and in the process of carrying ads from a blind ad network, you'll be handing your biggest asset - 100% of your advertiser relationships - over to that network.

Or - you can assume control of your advertising asset, sell to your advertisers at the premium you deserve, and own those advertiser relationships.

That's the unique angle Quigo brings to the table - the ability to capture the full value of a your brand and build a longer-lasting, strategic asset so that you get more than just a monthly rent check.

Most publishers are still under the influence of the Google koolaid. But the smarter ones are starting to realize that the bargain Google brings to the table benefits, well, mostly Google. It's great to see folks like Time Inc have the foresight to take back control of their advertiser relationships and become a leader in this space rather than become another node in the Google network.

Links:

• If you're an advertiser and would like to bid for placement on Time Inc properties, click here. Remember - this is now the only channel for placing CPC text ads on these websites.
• Full press release is here.
• More coverage over at ClicketyClack John Battelle's blog, BizReport, MediaPost, MediaWeek, Crain's, Direct Magazine and others.
  
• Brett Tabke of WebMasterWorld posted a video interview with Quigo's CEO - Mike Yavonditte.
• [UPDATE] Scott Karp at Publishing2.0 posted some excellent commentary on the bigger picture. Highly recommended. 

 

What can we learn from iLike?

Since introducing its Facebook app, iLike has been growing like crazy (300,000 users per-DAY????... wow...). A lot of people obviously find this to be a very very very useful tool.

In ways, iLike is doing with music what we aim to do with blog content over at outbrain.

So I was wondering - what can we learn from them? If you like iLike (hmmm...) - what is it exactly that makes this app work so well for you? Why do you recommend it to others? Is the Facebook virality its main cause for success? Or would it be as successful independently?

I'd love to get any feedback you have on this subject in the comments. Thanks!

Is OpenAds a threat to ad networks?

OpenAds is getting a ton of coverage following their recent $5M funding announced this week. OpenAds is a very popular, free, open-source ad serving system.
A lot of people are debating whether this will mark the end of the online ad networks. A particularly good post on the subject was published by Scott Karp over at Publishing2.0 - "Can Online Publishers Take Back Control From Ad Networks?"

I think, obviously, that the answer is 'no'. If anything, publisher-side exchanges like this will be very complimentary to the existing ad networks.

I posted a comment on Scott's post. It came out long enough to merit a full blog post, so here it is for you:

Hey - I’m the co-founder of Quigo. Great post, Scott.

Ad networks normally take a 30-40% cut of the revenue and pass the bigger part to the publisher. The question is whether we deliver more value than we cut, and I believe the answer in most cases is *absolutely yes*.

Here are a few ways we add value that would be very difficult for any single publisher to do on their own:

1) Appeal to large advertisers and agencies - I agree 100% with what Zach Coelius said above - it’s usually very difficult for any single publisher to attract large advertisers and agencies. The ad network facilitates larger ad buys for those and all participating publishers benefit in a way they could never do on their own.

2) Yield optimization algorithms - On auction-based networks (like Quigo and Google), the highest bidded ad in most cases is *not* the ad that would yield the most $$’s for the publisher. To find the highest yielding ads you need to crunch a lot of data and test ads on a massive scale. 99% of the publishers in the world do not have the scale necessary to make yield optimization algorithms efficient. Without this network value, the publisher will be rotating low yielding ads and would effectively be leaving a lot of money on the table.

3) Account management & expertise - Remember that online advertising is very very different from traditional advertising. For one, it needs to perform well for the advertisers… Most publishers do not have the expertise in-house to help advertisers with setting up bidding, optimizing for ROI, managing their budgets, etc, etc. This is a huge component of what we bring to the table as a network.

4) Vibrant marketplace - One of the big values auction-based ad networks bring to the table is a vibrant bidding marketplace. For that, again, there is huge value in aggregating many advertisers bidding each other upwards. A single publisher would find it extremely difficult to attract even say 100 advertisers to bid each other up.

5) Etc, etc.

I’m rooting for OpenAds and I think they are a great solution for mid-tier, well-defined special interest niche sites, operated by highly technical folks. Those are sites that could benefit from hand-picking the few advertisers that would work best for them and their audience. Boing Boing or Slashdot are good examples. The ads on Boing Boing are perfect for their audience and no ad network would be able to pick better ones.

But for all other publishers I think the ad networks add a ton more value than they take off the table.

At Quigo we’re focused on getting our publishers the best of both worlds: The advantages the ad network brings to the table, combined with the advantages of selling to advertisers directly, under the publishers’ brands and owning those relationships with advertisers. This is very different from “black box” type ad networks like Google & Co which are the absolute opposite from a platform like OpenAds.

Thanks again for writing this interesting post.

The post every software engineer and PM should read

Here's why Joel Spolsky has one of the most popular blogs in the software world. This post is a must-read for anyone developing a software product (and definitely for all the software engineers and product managers over at Quigo and outbrain!):

A game of inches

Don't let the slow start detract you.

Google, Quigo and ad transparency

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.

Favorite posts on WebX.0, take 2

A couple of weeks ago we released the v.1 of the outbrain API. This allows RSS feed aggregators (or publishers) to integrate full ratings capabilities into their services.

This week we're adding a neat little feature to the API, enabling partners to get the top rated posts for each blog, as rated by the outbrain community. I posted a few top-5 lists (for Seth Godin's, Guy Kawasaki's and Joel Spolsky's blogs) over at the outbrain blog.

And here are the current top-5 favorite posts of this blog, as rated by the outbrain community:

1. outbrain, funding, bubbles, etc - rated 4.83 out of 5
2. Movie Theatres 2.0 - rated 4.5
3. Idea: Cooking timer site - rated 4.5
4. Favorite posts on WebX.0 - rated 4.43
5. Supermarket 2.0 - rated 4.4

Cool!

Pop-up blockers blockers

I use Firefox, with Yahoo and Google toolbars installed. I also occasionally use IE7 (directly, or via the wonderful IE Tab extension). And I have a bunch of anti-virus, anti-adware, anti-spyware, etc programs installed.

When the first pop-up blockers were introduced, they were great. But with ~10 different applications all attacking those poor helpless pop-ups, I'm finding that this once useful tool is becoming a real nuisance. The reason: On those few sites where I actually do want pop-ups to pop I now need to go and disable (or white-list) 10 different apps and toolbars.

I thought there must be a solution for this growing pain, but couldn't find any. So here you go with a free idea - feel free to take it and build your next mega-business with it.

The idea is to develop a Pop-Up Blocker Blocker. As the name implies - once installed, this software would block all the pop-up blockers from doing their thing for a given website.

I think this can be huge.

Movie Theatres 2.0

A little known fact is that I have a private, full-sized theater. Actually five theaters. I don't technically own them... Regal Entertainment does and is gracious enough to operate them exclusively for me and my family.

Or at least that's the impression I get. In nearly all movies we go to, we seem to have the whole theater pretty much to ourselves. I might be missing something in Regal's business plan, but it seems to me awfully hard to sustain that huge operation just for an occasional visit of the 4 of us (well, I admit - the price we pay for a single bucket of pop-corn does probably cover a month's rent and then some).

There are 100 reasons why theaters are bleeding audience (DVD's, TiVo's, VOD, Netflix, etc, etc). But I think at the core it all boils down to the fact that the scheduling of movies in theaters totally sucks. The movies playing in theaters at any given day are determined by some anachronistic distribution structure that was conceived ~80 years ago, an era in which content (and film reel distribution) were in short supply, and audiences were abundant.

This is flipped by 180⁰ today: content (and distribution means) are abundant, and audience attention is extremely scarce. This requires flipping the distribution model by 180⁰ too.

Here's an idea that I'm hereby contributing to the movie theater industry, free of charge:

• Launch a website where people can signup with their zip code.
• Hook up to IMDB (or the likes), and let people browse a catalog of movies.
• Let each registered user check the movies they're interested in seeing in theater format.
• As soon as a movie reaches X number of interested viewers, the system will find an open screening slot for the next 1-2 weeks.
• An automated email would go out to all those that signed up for that movie.

There are probably about 50 movies I can think of which I missed when they were first playing in theaters and I'd love to see on the big screen. Probably about another 100 which I'd be happy to see again in theater format. And probably about 500 others that I can't even remember right now.

Imagine being able to go out to the movies and see Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings or The Matrix or even Citizen Kane... Or taking my kids out to see ET or Charlie Chaplin or Disney's Fantasia... How cool would that be?!....

(I know - there are probably a hundred technical and legal reasons why not to do this... whatever... I guess the Regal's of the world will just have to die while babbling those excuses before someone like Mark Cuban does this...)

[1] Photo by bubblestar over at Flickr

Top-10 Israeli web 2.0 companies

alarm:clock has a nice overview of their top-10 Israeli web 2.0 startups. I particularly agree with one of the runner-ups... ;-)

Momix - Highly recommended

My wife treated me yesterday to the Momix show at the Joyce Theater. And what a treat it was! This is easily one of the best shows I've ever seen. As far as I could tell, there's no deep philosophical layer or storyline (or at least I was too stupid to notice any...), so the highly intellectual among you might find the show disappointing.

But Momix is simply stunning to watch. The dancers are incredible, and the scenes and music are all beautiful. It's really amazing to see how ~8 dancers with a minimal set and minimal accessories (3 sticks, a ball, a hoola-hoop, etc) can create magic. Highly recommended.

Here's a video of one of my favorite scenes in the show:

(if you're reading this in an RSS reader, you may need to click here to see the video)

Momix is showing daily at the Joyce through June 10th. If you're in NYC this week - go get your tickets now.