Transparent is the new opaque with Quigo

If you’ve ever had a business relationship with Google (i.e. Google Adwords or Adsense), you may already know that it’s a little less than egalitarian. While the services they offer are innovative, and, if done right, lucrative, Google holds all the cards (I’ll pause here to say that I know that there are other contextual advertising services out there, but Google is undoubtedly the biggest and will get all of my attention today). If a problem arises where you question the quality of the Google services, you’ll probably end up having to accept whatever Google tells you (and that can range from “You’re right, let’s work something out” to “We don’t agree, sorry.”)

Quigo is changing this, and offering an alternative to Google domination. Now, no one will ever be able to infiltrate Adwords results that appear in the Google search engine, but contextual ads that appear on private sites are completely controlled by the site owner. This control is attractive, and some huge sites are already leveraging the Quigo way of life.

What is Quigo doing, exactly? Here’s how the NYTimes put it:

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. (full article)

Transparent is the new opaque. Again, this is more of having to take Google’s word for it. If you are an advertiser and have a question about where your ads are running, good luck getting an answer. This isn’t to say that the Google technology isn’t advanced, and probably accurate most of the time, but there is a danger to Google being so large. They can’t possibly track everything, and since they can’t, you can’t either.

This probably isn’t news to everyone, and I’m sure there are companies out there that are completely aware of Google’s position and have chosen to stay out of the contextual advertising space for this very reason. Imagine how the market might grow now that there are alternatives to Ma Google.

Learn more about Quigo here and here.