Said Time Inc., Who Needs Google?

By Louise Story

For the last few years, publishers have seen text ads on their Web sites as found money, as they struck deals with Google and later Yahoo to place ads that relate (more or less) to the topics of their pages. Now they are starting to see those ads, small as they are, as so important they want to sell them themselves.

Oh yes, there is that worry that Google, in particular, may be getting too much power in the advertising business.

So it’s no surprise that Time Inc. said today that it will stop running Google and Yahoo text ads and instead sell its own little boxes of text to run on its Web sites like Time.com, CNNMoney.com and People.com.

Time has signed a three-year agreement with Quigo , a small technology company based in New York, that allows Time’s own ad sales people to offer text ads in packages with its other online and offline ads.