Quigo

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

~ the eulogy ~

i have never knowingly used a quigo product, which is not the same thing as never having looked at one. adsonar units sat on espn.com and foxnews.com through the middle of the last decade and they did not carry the word quigo anywhere a reader would find it. the name that eventually reached me out of this company was a completely different name, and it took about fifteen years to get here.

yaron galai and oded itzhak started it in israel in 2000. galai had already built and sold one advertising company by then, ad4ever, which ended up inside atlas. quigo's business was contextual advertising, the thing where software reads what is on the page and picks an ad that has something to do with it, and by 2000 that was not a new idea at all. google adsense was the thing everyone else in the category got measured against.

what quigo sold was the part google would not sell. adsense was a sealed box. you put the tag on your page and money came back, without ever learning whose ad had run or what it had cleared at. adsonar let a publisher see who had bought the slot and set a floor under it. mediapost later called galai the man who was four years ahead of adwords, which is generous, but the transparency argument was real and it worked on exactly the sort of publisher that already had a sales team and did not enjoy being told nothing.

i was in ankara doing engineering work across the whole span of this and the category was invisible from where i sat, which is true of almost everybody. in those days. ad technology is the one layer of the web that nobody signs up for. it is also the layer that decided what the rest of it would look like, and every reader on every one of those pages was inside the product without ever making an account.

~ the dossier ~

~ the deal ~

aol announced the purchase on 7 november 2007 and closed it the following month. three hundred and sixty-three million dollars, which is a real number for a seven-year-old company operating in a market google already owned. really though, the logic on aol's side is legible enough. aol had advertising.com, which sold display inventory and had no contextual product worth the name, and quigo arrived with espn and foxnews already signed.

then the usual thing happened, which is that nothing happened. adsonar kept serving and stopped being developed, and the brand was quietly retired into a product line called advertising.com sponsored listings. by the time aol itself was sold to verizon in 2015 there was nothing left under the name to point at.

~ what it became ~

galai founded outbrain in 2006 with ori lahav, which means he was building the next company while still running this one. to be honest, that detail reframes the whole sale. outbrain is the thing under the article: the grid of pictures at the bottom of a news page, with headlines that are not quite headlines. everyone reading this has scrolled past it today.

so the honest ending is that quigo did not really lose anything. it took three hundred and sixty-three million dollars and vanished, while the idea underneath it went and found a much larger body to live in. that idea is that a publisher will take money for the space next to its own writing and will not look too hard at what shows up in it.

quigo.com resolves today to a markmonitor holding page, the kind of thing a large company pays a small annual fee for so that nobody else can have a name it stopped using in 2008. the domain is being defended. there is nothing behind it to defend.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »