Espotting Media

» see espotting.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

espotting never sold anything to a person. it sold keywords to businesses in eleven european countries and turkey was not one of them, so the only way i met it was from the wrong side of the screen, in the sponsored block at the top of a lycos or altavista results page around 2002. that block is the part of a search page a student learns to scroll past without reading. it was also espotting's entire company.

seb bishop and daniel ishag started it in london in 2000. both had come out of an advertising agency, bishop was twenty-six, and the timing was terrible in the way that occasionally turns out to be good: the crash had just taken the air out of banner advertising, and an ad you only paid for when somebody clicked it looked less like a gamble than a display buy did. overture had proven the model in america. europe had nobody doing it.

what espotting built was the supply side of that. rather than run its own destination search engine, it filled the paid results of engines other people already owned, which by 2002 meant the european arms of yahoo and lycos alongside altavista and ask jeeves. the financial times put it on a list of the fifty most creative businesses in britain that year. at its height it had something on the order of sixteen thousand advertisers buying keywords through it.

~ the record ~

~ the land grab ~

the european search market in 2001 was still genuinely open. google was growing fast but adwords had only just moved to a cost-per-click auction, and local portals still had real traffic they needed somebody to sell the commercial slots against. espotting got there first and signed them, which for about three years was a very good place to be standing.

the weakness was in the shape of it. espotting owned no audience of its own. every euro it earned came through a contract with an engine that could renegotiate, and the engines were watching google turn the same business into the most profitable thing on the internet. a distribution middleman in a market with one obvious eventual winner is a business with a clock attached to it.

~ how the name went away ~

findwhat.com, the american pay-per-click network, merged with espotting in 2004 in a deal valued at about 186 million dollars, and the combined company claimed a hundred thousand advertisers across two continents. bishop stayed on as president. for a year the group traded under findwhat in america and espotting in europe, which was two brands doing one job.

on 6 june 2005 both were dropped for miva, a name taken from a small ecommerce software company the group had also bought. the rebrand was finished inside the month and the nasdaq ticker changed on the thirteenth. miva spent the next few years losing ground to google and eventually sold off its media network. the espotting.com domain does not resolve at all in 2026. the whole arc, from an agency resignation to a name nobody kept, took five years.

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