AOL to Buy Quigo for $300 Million

[Brett_Tabke]

It was just a few months ago that Quigo signed a major advertising deal with Time. Now it looks like that deal is turning into an acquisition.

The purchase is designed to help the Time Warner unit better compete against the stepped up online ad initiatives from Google and Yahoo. Quigo's two main ad serving products include AdSonar, which is similar to AdSense in terms of providing targeted placements on websites and through searches, and FeedPoint, a search engine marketing tool.

[biz.yahoo.com...]

I was fortunate enough to interview CEO Mike Yavonditti a couple months ago:

[searchengineworld.com...]

[Compworld]

Interesting and congrats to Quigo. I just see it may be an uphill battle for AOL to get anti-trust approval with just buying Tacoda, Third Screen Media, and Advertising.com not to long ago. If not in the US, possibly in the EU. Same problem Google is having with Double Click, and in related news in terms of mergers, Sirius and XM is having with the Justice Department.

[johntext]

Congrats to the hard working folks at Quigo. AOL is living up to its stated goal of becoming one of the major players in online advertising going forward.

[weeks]

Quigo's technology is good. And their basic marketing idea is sound enough (see Google), but most of their partners (especially the newspapers) wouldn't commit to local directories or building databases (how most would close off their archives is the best example). That has made it tough for Quigo.

AOL "gets it." Quigo doesn't have to explain itself over and over and over any more.

(And the newspapers had darn well better "get it" if they are going to be a player in the local market. Alas, the deal many of the newspapers made with Yahoo recently is going to crimp Quigo's ability to sell to that market. Never mind that, however. As they have discovered, there are plenty of other fish in the sea.)

[JS_Harris]

AOL is missing from my analytics on most days. I just took a quick look and found that one of my sites hadn't received a single visitor from AOL in over two months even on terms that rank #1 accross the other major engines and bring visitors daily.

Go figure that today AOL is sending a fair amount of traffic to this site, and now this news article. AOL is back on the scene!

I hope the move pays dividends for AOL

[Brett_Tabke]

[informationweek.com...]