Shak - 5:09 pm on May 21, 2003 (gmt 0)

Just been reading a story on Espotting

The expansion of the Kelkoo deal comes as good news to Espotting, which lost out on a deal to rival Google last week to provide sponsored links to the Ask Jeeves UK site. Espotting had been delivering the sponsored links section of Ask Jeeves UK for 18 months, before it decided to go with Google with whom it already partners with the US. Espotting said that despite not providing the sponsored links section of the Ask Jeeves UK website, it still has a presence on the site though the meta-search section at the bottom of the page, which allows Espotting advertisers to reach Ask Jeeves' users. In addition, Chrys Philalithes, marketing director at Espotting, said the company has been monitoring both its traffic and revenue since last Friday, when the Google/Ask Jeeves deal took effect, and has seen no significant change to either.

[netimperative.com...]

Now as much as liking Espotting as a user and client, what planet do they think we are on. ASK.co.uk was 1 of their biggest partners, and being dropped will result in more £££ going over to Google...

If this continues, sooner or later the impact will be felt where Partners such as Yahoo will want to know why their average CPC share is lower from Espotting on Yahoo.co.uk > Overture on Yahoo.com (UK surfers)

considering they have a direct comparison model to go on, I think its extremely likely that changes will be taking place in the very near future.

the above combined with more and more domain aggregators leaves very litlle for Espotting out there, unless they will be a target for someone like KelKoo to now buy them instead of being a partner.

Shak