Today, OnVista has sold our former project Ligatus which we started in 2003 for 18.75 Mio. EUR to Gruner & Jahr. Hope everyone is happy with this deal and our former colleagues might stay longer than the next 6 months in Cologne.
Here you find more details on this transaction.
Sorry, for my long silence. While lots of interesting things happend within the last six months we worked 120% on the launch of Ormigo Profiles. Ormigo Profiles allows local merchants for the first time to acquire qualified buyers for their products and services in a very easy and effectiv way. Please, check it out: www.ormigo.com
If you wanna learn more about Ormigo you might also watch our first tv-interview.
Wow, what a headline on ARD, one of the largest tv-channels in Germany, regarding to my previous work. Is OnVista smarter than Google?
Hard to believe that OnVista could be smarter than Google with it’s hundreds of PhD’s. But still, Ligatus is a good niche approach connecting large marketers who are willing to pay a premium price to get high quantity of qualified traffic with leading publishers taking at least for the moment some butter of Google’s bread. It will be interesting to see how this story is continuing…
Do you know any other performance marketing approach outperforming AdSense?
This summer I had the pleasure to meet Seth Goldstein discussing the future of lead based advertising and his ideas about Root Markets. I pretty much liked his mind shifting ideas although his concept behind was hard to understand.
As Pamela Parker of ClickZ puts it in her article following the lead to a more transparent future "Root Markets wants to do nothing less than marry the financial market with the Internet advertising market."
As the lead market is a high arbitrage business where publishers don’t know what their leads are worth, and consumers have little idea of what their data is worth to advertisers which face the problem to decide how much to pay for which lead, a transparent and liquid market is missing. That’s what Seth is up to:
"Our goal is to be a neutral, independent exchange where we try to get out of the way of the market participants. We want to provide some open market data and an environment in which people can compete and trade and do business under a level playing field. There’s no black box where we’re hiding performance data."
Another big thing about Root Markets is to empower users to control and handel their data via it’s non-profit AttentionTrust. Therefore, users can install a recorder which tracks everything they do with their browser. It both allows to turn of and deletion of data. As TechCrunch put’s it "you get two primary benefits - the ability to see your own data (see screen shot), and the ability to trade your data to other parties for some benefit - like more targeted advertising that you will actually find useful."
I like both ideas to create transparent markets and empowering consumers, but still believe it’s hard to revolutionize such a fragmented market with as many players as consumers, publishers, intermediaries, advertisers as well as investors.
All the best for you and your great team, Seth. I will stay watching 
TDavid has a very intersting post about "accidense" meaning what happens when people accidentally click on Google Adsense ads due to white space arround the ad. He noticed that some AdSense ads have more white space than others fostering more non-intentional clicks. I noticed that accidense happens pretty often to me on skyscrapers and wallpapers when I try to scroll down on my notebook.
So, why the hell are accidense possible? Maybe, because it’s just to hard to make the white color space arround ads and links unclickable
I believe accidense happens becaue there are losers and winners like in real life: users lose time and focus, while advertisers lose money to publishers and/or syndicators as Google which are the real winners like insureances.
So, why don’t advertisers do anything against accidense? Hmm, maybe first of all they don’t know about. Second, they lose control about ad delivery when they once set their clickprice in AdWords. Third, they need to control their performance from ad delivery to user’s last action which is still a very challenging task for even large marketers.
Due to market pressure Google might give advertisers back more control as they just have started to do with the possibility to bid different prices on search and contextual placements as well as choosing certain pages. But still, accidense next to click-fraude will cause more non-intentional traffic and additional expenses on advertiser’s side.
Within the last two years I also screened the pay-per-call model and it’s provider as Ingenio or ZiffLeads to set-up an own business. As we don’t have any pay-per-call provider in Germany, I believed it would have been more or less easy to convince VCs to invest but I doubt german users would either use it or publisher would integrate it. Why?
1. Many advertisers told me users don’t use their free call-back functions on their website, they prefer writing a mail sitting in front of their computer instead of picking-up their phone. Additionally Germans aren’t used to call free numbers as Americans are with their 0800-numbers. VoIP might change this over time.
2. Publishers will integrate advertising solutions which drive more revenues to them and I still doubt that a pure pay-per-call model creates more transactions and revenues than Google AdSense which is the benchmark to beat to get adspace in Germany.
But it will be very interesting to see when Google mixes both models up. So, the customer is free to choose between a click and a call. I would first click and then call the advertiser - so Google and it’s publishers would earn it twice…
It seems to be that Google completes it’s ABC: analytics, base and now click-to-call followed by desktop, earth, froogle…
As SearchEngineWatch posts Google begins to test a click-to-call advertising program. Of course, the call itself is free to it’s users and advertisers, which will still pay for user’s connection. But one interesting questions remains: Will Google charge per click or per call? If they charge per call they are not far away from offering pay-per-lead and/or pay-per-order mixing up their successful pay-per-click model.
Greg Yardley has first screenshots of Google’s click-to-call ads as well as a link to Google’s FAQ for their click-to-call product.
24/7 Real Media released its Top 10 online advertising and interactive marketing predictions for 2006. Here, the top five predictions: