Quigo Hires Top Talent Away From Ebay and PayPal

Marty Abbott and Michael Fisher to join Quigo.

[Brett_Tabke]

From Quigo Press release [home.businesswire.com]

... Mr. Abbott was the senior vice president of technology in charge of the daily technical and site-specific operational overview of eBay and all of its subsidiaries.

Mr. Fisher joins Quigo after having served as Vice President, Engineering & Architecture for PayPal, an eBay company. He was responsible for all aspects of the 220 person organization including recruiting, training, delivery, architecture, strategic vision...

Quigo sure has made some big moves lately.

[Drastic]

Good, maybe they'll finally get their full contextual offering out of beta.

[galai]

AdSonar has been out of beta for a while. We just have a very selective policy regarding the publishers we accept to the network.
(disclosure: I am a Quigo emplyee)

[Drastic]

Hi Yaron,

I thought you only offered the following categories:

Cars, Weddings, Sports, Health, Beauty & Fitness, Travel and Education

and other cats were just in beta for now, not open to publishers?

From your site:
"More AdSonar content-categories will launch soon. Publishers who are interested are encouraged to sign-up below and they will be notified when their category will launch."

[galai]

That is correct. However the reason for that is not beta testing of the technology (which we believe is now world-class), but rather to make sure that we can control supply & demand in a way that ensures high CPC's and eCPM's for our publisher network. We strongly prefer to maintain a high quality network in narrower categories, rather than become a low quality network in all categories.

That said, we have recently signed over 130 newspapers into AdSonar:

Quigo Technologies Inc. announced several agreements with the online divisions of American newspapers, including Newsday (a Tribune company), Media General, Scripps Howard and Media News Group. The contracts collectively call for over 130 newspapers across the country to install private label versions of the AdSonar Exchange on their Web sites, turning each site into an auction marketplace where ad placement is up for grabs.

(full article here: [searchenginejournal.com ] )

Newspapers by nature are non-vertical. Therefore you can expect AdSonar to expand into new verticals at an expedited pace in the near future.

[TurboDan]

Ha. My site fit PERFECTLY into their automotive category. I guess they didn't like the fact that 0.7% of my traffic isn't from the U.S.

This company is a joke, and will "select" themselves right into bankruptcy if they don't actually get things moving.

[sezampicika]

yes, they are joke. Now they look into all little things and bann sites for silly reasons.

but while they were serving FINDWHAT ads they allowed all kinds of operations on publishers websites (that are allowed, but also the things that were not allowed by findwhat!).

but when they started to server their own ads, they started to bann publishers day by day..

interesting

[sezampicika]

Mr. "former CEO" Galai... Do you have any comments?

[Tigrou]

Adsonar is a weird beast. I do well with it on one site that I have (travel) but was thrown out on another one (health).

Adsonar was pretty good about being transparent - they provided log files that "proved" cheating. The problem, it seems, is that one unknown IP clicked on ads 8 times over the course of a few months. Wasn't an IP I recognised (and certainly wasn't me).

2-3 unnatural clicks a month to get thrown out? This is going to be a major problem for them as:
a) accidents happen when you work on a site
b) competitors can easily knock each other out of the program.

Hopefully Quigo will wise up over time.