ESPN Tells Yahoo!: Clean Out Your Locker
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | September 8, 2006 | Share This
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The NFL season just got underway, and appropriately, sports megasite ESPN.com is in the mood to make some roster changes. They cut Yahoo!’s sponsored contextual links, calling up Quigo to take its place, says ClickZ.
Quigo’s AdSonar system allows ESPN greater flexibility in the way it handles its contextual ads, which run alongside the site’s stories. It also gives ESPN’s advertisers more control over where their ads run, as it they’ll “be able to bid on the text links by site, site section, keyword or topic through Quigo’s platform, or purchase the pay-per-click ads directly from ESPN.”
The ESPN deal effectively doubles the size of Quigo’s publisher network, which also includes such sites as ABC News, USAToday, FoxNews, and a number of regional newspaper publishers. They’re now serving about 4 billion ad impressions a month.
Yahoo isn’t totally on the outs with ESPN…yet. They still power the site’s search and provide search ads, although ClickZ indicates that Quigo will take over the latter duties in the future. And as for the onsite search? “We’re talking with [Yahoo] and others…to determine what the future of Web search will be on ESPN.com,” says ESPN spokesman Paul Melvin. So it looks like Yahoo will have to audition just to keep its starting job.
For another take, check Marketing.fm; they think ESPN might just be getting a better revenue split from Quigo.
Topics: Advertising: Contextual |