Quigo Technologies expanded its contextual listings publisher network to include USAToday.com, NYPost.com and a few specialty sites.
USAToday.com will show Quigo's AdSonar listings in its health and sports sections. It uses IndustryBrains to power its travel section listings while showing Google's AdSense listings in other sections of the site. NYPost.com is using AdSonar in its health, travel and sports sections.
Adventure travel site iExplore.com is also using Quigo. And Quigo said World Publications, which runs sites such as Caribbean Travel & Life, has started using AdSonar.
Quigo's AdSonar Exchange network includes 200 sites, focused in the sports, health, education and travel verticals.
Quigo's advertising platform works similarly to Google's AdSense. AdSonar scans Web pages for their content and returns related advertiser text listings based on the keywords its technology extracts. Advertisers pay each time a user clicks on an ad, and the revenue is split between Quigo and the publisher.
AdSense has dominated the contextual listings market, showing content listings on major sites like NYTimes.com and thousands of smaller ones. Smaller players like Quigo, Kanoodle and IndustryBrains are focusing on specific niches instead. Though that can yield a more focused audience, smaller programs offer fewer leads, potentially making the cost of managing the ads greater than the return.
“I think in most of my verticals there's enough volume to keep advertisers happy,” said Michael Yavonditte, Quigo's CEO. “That volume is only increasing.”
Ad rates on Quigo publishers tend to be higher than AdSense, Yavonditte said. IExplore.com, for example, has a minimum click price of 50 cents.
Though AdSonar has replaced AdSense listings in some sections of USAToday.com and NYPost.com, Yavonditte said Quigo offers publishers a much different proposition than AdSense since it is tightly focused on specific niches.
“We don't compare ourselves to AdSense,” he said. “We don't feel like we're competing with Google.”
