Is the P going for ad theft?

Webspidering Publi- Groupe builds its own webspider. Also for Class. However, ad theft is not planned.

Webspidering Publi- Groupe builds its own webspider. Also for Class. Webspidering, the targeted search of the Internet for specific information, is almost as old as the World Wide Web itself. Every search engine works according to this principle. Web spidering becomes problematic when information, such as classified advertisements, is collected and published for which a fee has to be paid elsewhere. Various providers, including anzeiger.ch and insernet.ch, have been doing this in Switzerland for a long time in a targeted, professional manner and, according to a recently published Federal Court ruling, with the blessing of the judiciary. Now another web spidering service, albeit one that has only just been planned, is causing new unrest in the industry: PubliGroupe, Switzerland's largest advertising intermediary, is in the process of developing its own web spider. This is clear from the documents that P recently published in connection with the Class project. One person who is watching this with suspicion is Patrick C. Price, Chief Marketing Officer of Scout24 Schweiz AG. "Spidering cannot be in the interests of a commercial online marketplace. If everyone starts spidering each other, then the advertiser will no longer pay for an advertisement anywhere in the long term," he says. The fact that the P, of all companies, is now also developing a web spider is beyond him. "In doing so, the P is driving the price erosion in the classified section even further, thereby reducing the business model of Class and the situation of the publishers to absurdity."
However, this is also the view at P. "If we were to collect advertisements from everywhere like anzeiger.ch, Class would make no sense. An industry solution that costs a good 10 million francs would then actually be superfluous," says Andreas Göldi, head of the new P contact point PubliConnect. The web spider that P is developing will therefore only be used to collect online advertisements. For example, a bank that advertises its vacancies on its own website can commission P or another Class partner to collect the advertisements and publish them on the Class network for a standard market fee.
But Göldi also admits that P is pursuing a second goal: "With our web spider, we are conveying the message that we would be technically prepared if this became necessary." This would be the case if online platforms, search engines and other providers were to increase their use of web spidering, as has already been announced in some cases. Class would then "spider back". The result would be as follows: The member platforms would first show their own advertisements, and on a second click, the spidered hits would appear.
However, Göldi is aware that, from the searcher's point of view, web spidering could result in a loss of quality in terms of accuracy. "Spidering brings cabbage and turnips together. A precise search or meaningful linking is hardly possible without a structured database in the background," he says. Multiple mentions of the same hit, lack of topicality, loss of credibility by separating the advertisements from the original environment - these are all further possible consequences of spidering. Göldi: "We don't want that. On the contrary: Class has high quality standards." This is precisely why it makes sense for Göldi to invest millions in Class despite the threat of web spidering.
Peter Müller, CEO of Unio, a solution provider for cross-media advertising and print management, takes a different view: "With this expensive investment, Class is quite risky," he says. It is true that web spiders still have tricky problems to solve with updating the ad inventory, excluding multiple entries and clean cataloging. "But that's only a matter of time," he is convinced. This raises the question of whether the resourceful mind of Peter Müller and his Unio are in the process of developing the corresponding software themselves. Müller's answer is short and sweet: "No comment."
Markus Knöpfli

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