Finally "FindWhat said shareholders of privately-held Espotting would get 7 million shares of FindWhat stock and about $20 million in cash. FindWhat said the total deal values Espotting at about $170 million based on last Friday's closing stock prices"
(from Rueters) Back in June FindWhat & Espotting crafted a deal of similar value. The problem with the old deal is that some of Espotting's books looked weak and FindWhat has seen its stock rise considerably. The original deal was 8.1 million shares of FindWhat and $27 million in cash.

On a side note, it looks as if someone will be buying $200 in beer at the next Pub Conference.

"FindWhat also reported fourth-quarter net income of $3.5 million, or 15 cents per share, compared with a year-earlier profit of $2.7 million, or 14 cents per share.

For 2004, the company offered guidance for revenue of $95 million, with net income of 60 cents per share. Analysts surveyed by Reuters Research, a unit of Reuters Group, had expected revenue of $96.6 million and earnings per share of 63 cents."
(source News.com)

List of major world wide pay per click search engines. Pay Per Click

I recommend starting out using the pay per click search engines with the greatest distribution first as they have faster feedback loops, higher traffic quality, and greater distribution.

Google AdWords (1) - powers Google, Ask Jeeves, AOL, IWON, Earthlink and many other sites

Overture (2) appears on Yahoo, MSN InfoSpace, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and many other sites. Owned by Yahoo.

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Pay per click search engines usually drive most of their traffic based on their partner network. Pay per click ads are mixed in with meta search engines and usually exist at the top of search results on major search engines. (personal rankings)
Enhance Interactive (6)
Espotting (European) powers many European portals which are not powered by Overture or AdWords
Findology - smaller PPC which allows you to select which partners your ads will appear on and lets you target your ads geographically. Primarily focused on lead generation, retail, and adult traffic markets. (8)
FindWhat (3)
Google AdWords (1) - powers Google, Ask Jeeves, AOL, IWON, Earthlink and many other sites
Kanoodle (5) - Kanoodle has some really cool features and a good contextual advertising program (especially for financial type websites).
LookSmart - while actually being a directory, LookSmart has a decent sized distribution network. I have been told many complaints about their poor customer service though and when I tried their engine their traffic quality was crap. Recommend avoiding (4)
Overture (2) appears on Yahoo, MSN InfoSpace, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and many other sites. Owned by Yahoo.
Search123 (7)

Yahoo Shopping is abandoning its 3.5% revenue share model. They are leaving it in the cart!

What is Yahoo! doing? Yahoo! is switching Yahoo! shopping to a pay per click model.

Why would Yahoo! do that? This places more competitive market advantages in Yahoo!'s favor. They will get a larger share of revenue since sites which have poor conversion rates will not be able to compete.

I liked Yahoo! Shopping the way it was... They are requiring all current participants to sign up for the new program by March 1st.

Why should I switch to the new Yahoo! Shopping model? They are giving away free clicks for the month of February to those who switch to the new program policies.

After the free trial month Yahoo! Shopping will be offering clicks at a 20% discount for an undisclosed amount of time. More details in the general anouncement and Product Submit FAQs

In a big fight between Google and Overture ads are spreading through the web.

Kelkoo, the third largest European shopping site, is to carry AdWords ads.

Overture is to display ads on Net Temps job portal, and they resigned a multi year deal with Wanadoo (Europe's #2 ISP).

Caution parady sites are fighting for their share of the pie. Everyone knows about YouHo, but Booble has came out of nowhere!

Just another tip on improving conversion rates with Google AdWords. When search words appear in a Google ad they are bolded. A good way to improve click through rate (and thus lower price per click) is to place keywords in the ad.

Sometimes it may not be practical to create 100 different ads and 100 different groupings. If you have similar terms which can use the same creative description, but you would like to have the title dynamically match searched keywords you can.

The syntaxt for Google AdWords Dynamic Keyword Insertion is {keyword: }

When you create the AdWords creative place {keyword: } in the first line and then fill out the rest of the creative like normal. Automatically your title will match the search terms which will improve click through rates. Please note that Google does not want this feature used on search terms which are mis spelled or otherwise break their ad policies.

When you use {keyword: } make sure you place a keyword after it so that search terms which may be too long or are not processed correctly still have an ad to show. I know this because I had one of my Google AdWords ads disapproved for not doing this. For me I would probably use something like {keyword:SEO Book}.

Some people will want to try this with a huge catalog of products and will lose money in the process. When products are widely varying you want to send the person to the specific page for that product so you must specify that as well.

This technique is likely to be most profitable to those who use it on smaller niche specific areas...the whole thing that makes Google so appealing is that you can customize every aspect of your ad and track every cent spent from begining to end.

Dynamic keyword insertion capitalization:
{keyword:} will make the title small
{KeyWord:} will capitalize all the words in the Google AdWords ad title.