The popular company AOL has recently been announced of planning to buy an Israeli ad startup for the huge amount of money of $300 million. The name of the lucky Israeli company is Quigo and the process of purchase has been said by the industry’s annalists to be one of AOL’s moves for competing better with the Internet titans such as Yahoo! Inc. or Google Inc. The first items of news about this plan have appeared in an Israeli newspaper anyway.
The Israeli ad startup called Quiqo has been founded in 2000 and it makes two products for Internet advertising, according the daily “Ha’aretz” newspaper’s report from Friday, the 2nd of November 2007. However, the report from the Israeli newspaper hasn’t also cited any source when writing about the planned purchase by AOL, which represents a unit of the huge New York-based entertainment company Time Warner Inc.
Quigo’s service AdSonar represents something similar to Google Inc.’s AdSense program, as it places links on search results. On the other hand the Israeli company’s FeedPoint product serves up the ads on search results or Internet web sites, relating the ads to the users’ own interests.
However, although no one known whether the Israeli newspaper is right, if the move takes place, it will apparently aim at improving AOL’s position against both Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. giant Internet companies.