Quigo Beats Google, MSN and Yahoo! To Time Inc's Online Ad Space

Bloomberg is reporting that neither Google, Yahoo! or MSN could persuade Time Inc. to allow them to place their ad system on Time's collection of 15 sites which include CNNMoney and People.com.

The alleged reason that Quigo won the race is that they attract the bigger brands with higher CPC budgets than any of the three search engines. Ari Levy and Gillian Wee from Bloomberg reasoned:

Quigo targets better-known publishers such as Time, ESPN and Slate, arranging deals that let online advertisers specify which pages they want to appear on rather than taking what they get. While Google now offers a similar bid-by-page option, Quigo may have an edge as the model's pioneer.

With the reported slowing in the growth of ad sales for Google from 77 percent in the second quarter last year to 58 percent in the same quarter this year it may prove that Google are getting near capacity with their core Adwords products and have to move to offer other CPC/CPA avenues such as Adwords in YouTube videos or YouTube in Google Earth which I expect will be the next to be heavily monetised. Then you've got the proposed Google Phone which could aid the next growth phase in their ad sales?

So is this the end of the big online property owners love affair with Adsense? Time Inc. will only tell.

The Bloomberg piece is well worth a read.