“The New York Times” reports today that Israeli start-up Quigo Technologies Inc. is posing a growing challenge to Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO) in the competition for contextual advertising business.
Quigo was co-founded in 2000 by CEO Yaron Galai and Oded Otzhak. It was financed by private investors after Israeli venture capital funds refused to invest in it. In 2003, it raised $12 million, from GlenRock Israel, Highland Capital Partners, and the Disney Corporation fund Steamboat Ventures. Quigo develops marketing technologies for content-sensitive focused search engines. The company’s solutions create automatic links and enables advertisers to retrieve relevant web-based content.
The “New York Times” said, “Google and Yahoo! have been fighting it out over which company will dominate the online advertising business. Although Quigo remains a small competitor, with less than 10% of the contextual ad business, its growing success has apparently persuaded Google to change the way it sells the sponsored link ads in the future. Contextual ads generated about $2 billion in revenue last year, or 13% of online ad spending, according to Internet advertising research firm eMarketer. Google and Yahoo post ads on hundreds of thousands of Web sites, but both operate as blind networks - they do not tell advertisers which sites their contextual ads run on.” “The New York Times” added that Google would be changing this in the near future.
Last month Quigo was selected by technology magazine “AlwaysOn Media” as the first among the top 100 private companies in the US.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes.co.il - on February 26, 2007
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