Overture
More info
- Creator
- Bill Gross (Idealab)
- Released
- 1998–2003
- Owner
- Yahoo (from 2003)
- Type
- Search advertising
The company that invented the search ad where advertisers bid for position and pay per click.
Bill Gross launched GoTo.com out of the Idealab incubator in 1998. Results were ranked openly by how much advertisers bid per click – an idea that first caused horror and then became the most profitable business model on the internet. GoTo renamed itself Overture in 2001 and syndicated its ads to other sites, including Yahoo and MSN.
In 2003 Overture bought both AltaVista and AllTheWeb, then was itself bought by Yahoo for $1.6 billion. It also sued Google for infringing its bidding patent; the case settled in 2004 for 2.7 million Google shares. Google's AdWords was an improved copy that factored in click-through rate, and the copy is what won.