ESPN Drops Yahoo Contextual Ads for Quigo AdSonar
Brian Morrissey at AdWeek reports that ESPN has decided on dropping the Yahoo powered contextual advertising (think high profile Yahoo Publisher Network ads) from its ESPN.com site. According to Brian’s coverage, ESPN has decided on selling the advertising placements itself.
ESPN.com will begin using the Quigo AdSonar system to sell and manage the text link placement within the ESPN.com site. The new option for advertisers will work similarly to Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing, but will be set up, purchased and managed by an ESPN only interface.
The ESPN Quigo system will let advertisers target via article keywords or specific ESPN.com channels such as Football, Soccer, or perhaps Fantasy Sports.
Morrissey adds:
The Disney Internet property is one of a handful of high-traffic sites to defect from the large ad networks run by Google and Yahoo in favor of operating their own programs.
By selling their own text ads, sites are able to keep all of the revenue and maintain relationships with advertisers. Typically, Google and Yahoo give publishers about 80 percent of revenue generated from clicks on the ads on their sites.
For those of you worried about Yahoo losing ESPN.com, don’t hold your breath. Yahoo and ESPN.com are still enjoying a strong search engine partnership where Yahoo provides Yahoo Search Technology powered organic search results and Yahoo Search Marketing Sponsored Links in searches performed on ESPN.com.
The two companies have done so since 2003 and this latest news only effects the contextual advertising within ESPN.com articles and sports coverage.
