• by Ross Fadner , October 24, 2004

Quigo Technologies, a paid search and contextual marketing services provider, this morning is expected to announce that it has signed agreements with high-profile publishers USATODAY.com, NYPost.com, National Geographic travel site iExplore, and World Publications, to serve contextual text ads on their Web sites.

Quigo's AdSonar Exchange program will serve text ads in the health sections and sports sections of USATODAY.com, and the health, travel, and sports sections of NYPost.com, as well as the travel site iExplore. World Publications will ultimately deploy AdSonar Exchange on each of its lifestyle and recreation Web publications.

As with Google's AdSense, publishers sign up automatically for Quigo's targeting platform, AdSonar Exchange. The technology matches advertisers and publishers using the same category index. Each index is comprised of category-specific keywords; advertisers bid against each other for placement on Quigo's publisher Web sites.

"We verticalize the world," said Quigo Chief Executive Mike Yavonditte, adding that Quigo's automated bidding process ensures that the advertisers on Quigo's publisher pages are always relevant. Yavonditte says that AdSonar also examines the context of both the page and the ad before serving it.

Quigo, which focuses on serving text ads in the sports, travel, health, and education sections of publishers' sites, now has agreements with about 150 online publishers.