In the beginning, there was GoTo.com, the first pay per click (PPC) advertising vendor I ever heard of. They had a trademark dispute with the Go Network, which was owned by Infoseek, because of the similarity of their logos.

So GoTo, which was already a publicly traded company by that point, changed its name to Overture. What GoTo/Overture invented was an incredibly brilliant business model. Instead of placing crappy banner ads that annoyed everyone all over the screen, they would orient search results in their engine based on who paid the most.

They became a content provider that didn’t have to provide any of the content—the advertisers did—and ran an auction where they were the only supplier and the prices were set by the market of advertisers. It was like being the only seller on eBay.

GoTo just printed money, and they invented the PPC space. They were soon emulated by Kanoodle, FindWhat, Enhance, and many others, including eventually Google.

Journyx was one of GoTo’s first customers and, as a result, we got stock at the IPO price.

Eventually GoTo (later Overture) was bought by Yahoo and is still the fundamental technology underlying Yahoo’s broken, difficult-to-use PPC engine today.

Google is crushing Yahoo even though Yahoo is the proud owner of the company that invented the PPC concept.

It’s all about execution sometimes.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO