Overture (GoTo.com)
The company that invented pay-per-click search ads and the syndicated search feed; bought by Yahoo in 2003.
Pasadena, California, USA · founded 1997 · yahooinc.com
What Overture (GoTo.com) does
GoTo.com was started in 1997 by Bill Gross at the incubator Idealab. Its idea was simple and at the time shocking: let advertisers bid for the top places in search results and charge them only when someone clicks. It was the first company to make pay-for-placement search work.
GoTo quickly found that its own site was not where the searches were. So it supplied its paid listings to bigger sites such as Yahoo and MSN and split the money with them. That is the first search feed, and the template for every syndication deal since. The company renamed itself Overture in October 2001.
Yahoo, its biggest customer, announced in July 2003 that it would buy Overture for $1.63 billion, and the deal completed that October. The business became Yahoo Search Marketing.
How it makes money
Advertisers paid per click; Overture shared that money with the portals and sites that displayed its listings.
Where it meets invalid traffic
Paying partners per click created the incentive to fake clicks almost at once. Click fraud on syndication partners was a problem from the early 2000s.
Products
- GoTo.com paid search
- Overture paid listings
- AltaVista and AlltheWeb (acquired 2003)