Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Deals Heat Up Comparison Shopping

Competitors are checking out shopping engines and scooping up the best buys. ValueClick purchased MeziMeida (owner of Smarter.com and CouponMountain.com), and last month a majority of NextTag was purchased by Providence Equity Partners.

A new generation of shopping engines is using Web 2.0 technology and social networking functions such as consumer product ratings to put pressure on the dominant engines such as Shopping.com and Shopzilla.

I'm actually surprised at the lack of advertising these search engines do. For all of the web surfing I do, I hardly ever come across a display ad for a shopping portal (enough with the insurance and refinance ads!), and I hadn't heard of many of the smaller engines. Because the sites carry such vast inventories, shopping engines don't buy many top keyword spots because it is too expensive. Or maybe it's that the ads are so lame that I don't even notice them? Shopping engines should be spending more than they are online and online if they want to grab people's attention. Advertising more on MySpace and the other social sites with targeted ads based on the content being read would be a good start.

Posted By John Gartner at 10:23 AM
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