London-based Espotting Media was founded in 2000. Along with Goto.com (then Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing is a keyword-based "Pay per click" or "Sponsored search" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo!.Yahoo began offering this service after acquiring Overture Services, Inc....

) it was a pioneer of pay per click

Pay per click

Pay per click is an Internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, where advertisers pay the publisher when the ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market...

 advertising on web search engine

Web search engine

A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results often referred to as SERPS, or "search engine results pages". The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other...

s.

European expansion paid off and revenues soared from just € 80,000 in 2001 to € 41 million in 2003.

Although successful, espotting did not have a strong partnership with any of the dominant search engines. When Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 and Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

 started to dominate the market place, espotting merged with US company FindWhat.com in 2004.

The merged company soon re-branded as MIVA, Inc. in 2005.

In 2009 MIVA, Inc. sold its MIVA Media ad network division to Adknowledge. As a result of this sale MIVA, Inc. rebranded to Vertro, and its MIVA Direct division rebranded to alot.com.