February 8, 2007

Miva Cutting Work Force By 20%

Miva announced today it has a restructuring plan that calls for a 20% reduction in its workforce. The company that evolved from the merger of FindWhat and ESpotting a couple of years ago expects to complete layoffs by May 2007, according to an Adotas report today.

Miva CEO Peter Corrao said the work force reductions are "fundamental to achieving our turnaround goal for stabilizing cash and returning to positive operating margins."

Posted by Frank Watson at 11:48 AM | Permalink

February 1, 2007

Miva Gets Vertical

Miva has added a vertical offering to its pay-per-click ad network. The Miva Precision Network, launched this week in the U.S. and U.K., promises narrower distribution and delivery of vertical-specific leads.

At launch, the network will span 18 sectors in the U.S.: adult, apparel, automotive, dating, education, electronics, entertainment, finance, health, insurance, mobile, office supplies, pharmaceutical, professional services, real estate, sports/recreation, technology and travel. In the U.K. the network will include 5 sectors: automotive, finance, gambling, health/beauty and recruitment.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:55 PM | Permalink

January 17, 2007

Miva InLine Ads Now Self-Serve

Pay-per-click ad network Miva is consolidating its search ads, contextual text ads and in-line text ads under a single management console. Dubbed Miva Monetization Center (MC), the self-service console allows publishers to set up and manage all three of its ad products in one place. Previously, the InLine ads, launched in September, were not available to publishers in a self-service console but were managed by Miva on a site-by-site basis.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:07 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2007

Miva Drops Yahoo Adds Google

Miva will replace their search partnership with Yahoo that dates back to 2001 and start a new relationship with Google as of January 27, 2007.

The annoucement came yesterday when Miva filed papers with the SEC.

The battle for publishing partnerships may be a major play in the search industry this year, as well as expansion in to the international markets.

Yahoo should be announcing a new aggressive international team in the very near future.

Posted by Frank Watson at 4:00 PM | Permalink

May 25, 2006

MIVA Seeing PPCall Monetization Growth

One of the most interesting elements of the announced eBay-Yahoo! alliance today is the potential for click to call and pay per phone call (PPCall). These are two distinct things: click to call is a VoIP-based calling infrastructure and PPCall is a billing or ad model. Theyre related but one doesnt always mean the other. However, in the case of portals and search engines testing click to call usually means were thinking about PPCall.

They obviously want to make money from calls; MIVA (though a partnership with Ingenio) appears to be doing so. Earlier this month the company reported that in its UK market the company was seeing bids for calls as high as £35 ($65.53). It didnt identify the category or categories in which these high bids were appearing, but theyre probably professional services categories (realtors, mortgage brokers, lawyers, etc.).

A couple of people have recently remarked to me that PPCall revenues have failed to materialize. The market is very much still in an early adoption phase. Click to call icons and phone numbers need to be more widely disseminated and the consumer behavior needs to be established before advertisers will show up in droves. (Small business adoption is a complicated "sidebar" to this discussion.)

Tracking phone calls (via 800 numbers or click to call), whether it?s monetized or not, helps marketers ?close the loop? with offline consumer purchase behavior. Marketers are often blind regarding how their online campaigns are actually influencing consumer behavior. If the marketer fulfills offline or the transaction happens offline tracking often isn?t there.

Calls aren?t a panacea for that problem ? what about the consumer who consults an online map to find a store location and doesn?t make a phone call? ? but they help provide greater visibility on the impact of online marketing on offline consumer transactions.

While at The Kelsey Group, I helped develop the original PPCall forecast that one sees quoted. That was a complicated process and heavily qualified by things like how and whether the big ad networks would push PPCall to the marketplace and how quickly. We have still yet to see any real implementation of PPCall on a major portal or engine beyond AOL?s deal with Ingenio. However, Google, Yahoo and MSN are all flirting with and/or actively testing systems out.

MIVA is building/rebuilding an advertiser network in its new incarnation as a full-service (consumer search, monetization, ad distribution), independent partner for publishers. It was first to market with PPCall in the US and Europe and it seems like the company is starting to gain traction with the product. (An interesting sidelight to this is MIVA's "pay per text" SMS product in the UK.)

Internet time is like ?dog years? (7x human years). And those are the accelerated expectations everyone brings to new initiatives. If there isn?t a ton of revenue in a very compressed time frame it must be a failure, right? PPCall and the local market more generally -- PPCall is partly about local though not entirely -- will continue to take time to develop.

The PPClick empire wasn?t built in a day. It took about eight or 10 years, depending on how you count it, to really develop massive revenues. Craigslist took a decade to become the classifieds juggernaut it is today. PPCall has really been around for about two and a half years.

Calls are important to the future of online advertising for many reasons. Just give it a little more time.

Posted by Greg Sterling at 11:57 AM | Permalink

April 4, 2006

Top Management Shakeup At Miva

Miva announced this evening that founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Craig Pisaris-Henderson and President Phillip Thune have resigned their positions, but will retain their seats on MIVA's Board of Directors.

Miva's board named Peter A. Corrao, previously chief operating officer, as chief executive officer, and said that Larry Weber, a director on the MIVA board, has assumed the position of non-executive chairman. Seb Bishop, a MIVA director, the Company's chief marketing officer and a founder of Espotting, will assume the role of president and will retain his duties as chief marketing officer.

More on the changes at Miva via this press release.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:56 PM | Permalink

November 7, 2005

Miva Enhances Search Ad Offerings

MIVA announced today the launch of Ad Center 3.0, an enhanced self-service campaign management tool for advertisers. The company also debuted a new broad match tool. More information about both programs can be found at the company's press release center.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 3:17 PM | Permalink

September 23, 2005

Miva UK Launches Algorithmic Search

Miva has rolled out a new algorithmic web search functionality to its distribution partners in the UK, powered by Fast Search & Transfer. Miva says that the new offering provides site inclusion and exclusion lists as well as the ability to blend search results to create a mix local and global content.

FAST still doing algorithmic web search? What about the non-compete agreements it signed when FAST sold AlltheWeb to Overture in 2003?

You may remember AlltheWeb, a great search engine that for a time competed head-to-head with Google. FAST sold AlltheWeb to Overture for $70 million to focus on its enterprise search business. Today AlltheWeb is essentially just a front-end to the Yahoo algorithmic search index.

FAST sold the AlltheWeb site to Overture, not the underlying crawler technology it used to develop the search engine. FAST has maintained and improved this web-crawler technology ever since, powering dozens of specialized web search services in both public and private implementations, including U.S. government portal FirstGov.gov, Italian regional search engine Virgilio, and others.

The choice of FAST as an algorithmic search partner makes sense for Miva, avoiding potential conflicts for customers that would arise with a Yahoo, Google or MSN powered web search. More information about MIVA's algorithmic web search for distribution partners is available here.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 6:34 PM | Permalink

August 21, 2005

Miva's Pay-Per-Call Service in the UK Goes Live in September

The Netimperative article: Miva launches pay-per-call service, reports that Miva's (aka FindWhat) pay-per-call service will go live in the UK on September 13th but, "advertisers can already sign-up for an account in advance of the launch."

Posted by Gary Price at 1:48 PM | Permalink

June 21, 2005

FAST Web Search Is Back Via New Miva Editorial Results

Miva -- the newly rebranded company encompassing FindWhat and Espotting -- has launched its own editorial or "algorithmic" results to compliment the paid listings it offers.

The results are currently only being offered to Miva partners in France and Germany. A press release is here.

The move harkens back to the Overture deals of Feb. 2003 to purchase AltaVista (Overture To Buy AltaVista) and AllTheWeb (Overture To Buy FAST Web Search Division).

Overture made those deals after finding the lack of an all-in-one solution -- editorial and paid results -- was a factor in it losing the AOL partnership deal to Google in 2002. Said then Overture CEO Ted Meisel in an investor conference call at the time:

"We have seen opportunities come and go that we would have liked to have won. We didn't have the full search solution our partners were looking for," Meisel said, during last week's call about AllTheWeb. "Those are the opportunities we would seek to reclaim."

Ironically, the AllTheWeb purchase seemed to have quashed plans Espotting had at that time to expand a deal it had inked with FAST to provide an all-in-one solution. FAST seemed to have sold off its entire web search division to Overture -- itself later purchased by Yahoo.

Despite the sale, FAST still kept its core search technology and has been allowed to offer search services to others. That's something you'd think Overture would have restricted. The failure to do this means despite the purchase of 2003, FAST is still out there competing with Yahoo.

Aside from the deal today, FAST recently had a big victory in January when it beat both Google and Yahoo as possible partners to power local search at AOL.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:24 AM | Permalink

June 6, 2005

FindWhat, Espotting Rebrand As Miva

FindWhat is undergoing a name change and taking Espotting along with it. Miva, formerly the name of the FindWhat-owned Miva Merchant ecommerce storefront tool, is now to serve as the new umbrella name for all of FindWhat's operations. What are those now and how will they be rebranded? Here's a rundown:

FindWhat & Espotting paid listing networks that primarily cover the US and Europe will become "Miva Media." FYI, there is an existing Miva Marketplace site, but that seems primarily to rebrand FindWhat listings to Miva ecommerce tool users.
The Miva Merchant tools are to become "Miva Small Business." This site is clearly the new home for that, but the home page currently brings up the umbrella Miva information. Instead, try this page for what will likely be offered at the Miva Small Business site.
Comet Systems, which provides an adware-powered search toolbar, weather applet and other desktop software, will become Miva Direct.

FindWhat's ticker will change on June 13. Rebranding is expected to be complete by the end of this month. More details in this FindWhat press release. ClickZ also has further coverage in FindWhat to Rebrand as Miva, touching on acquisitions FindWhat made in 2004 that fuel the need for rebranding, as well as some recent tough times that a rebranding might help with.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread, Espotting & FindWhat to Re-Brand as Miva.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:38 PM | Permalink

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