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Advertising - Wednesday, November 7, 2007

Confirmed: AOL Is Buying White Label Ad Platform Quigo For $340M

After a spate or rumors, AOL has officially announced it is buying Quigo. Reuters puts the amount of the buyout at $340M. Quigo has said it intended to file an IPO at some point.

AOL is a great fit for Quigo which specializes in white label advertising for top brands like ESPN and various Time Inc. brands. Think of Quigo as Adsense without Google as the middleman. The only strategic trouble that we can see is that some old media brands won't like to have rival Time Warner owning their data. But there are also rumors that Time Warner may spin off its online ad business (Platform A), in which case that may placate those concerns.

Quigo has raised $45M to date including a $30M recent round from existing investors: Steamboat Ventures, Highland Capital, Glenrock Ventures, IVP and Meritech Capital Partners.

In retrospect Quigo is another one of those lessons in sticking to it. The company was founded in 2000 in Israel and then bumped around for some time without picking up much momentum, then it zeroed in an an opportunity where it was hearing from large publishers that they wanted to run contextual ads on their sites but didn't want to work with Google Adsense, rather they wanted to own their ad platform outright.

Read - Reuters