For the last few months the team Overture acquired when it purchased AltaVista have been working in the background to launch the company's paid search listing service in Australia. This included registering the company Overture Services Australia and changing an existing company -- Overture Services (Australia) -- to Overture Australia, in preparation for a fourth quarter launch.
There is still some work to be done on the implementation of the paid search listing technology, but most of that work will be done from the U.S., according to Mel Bohse, the managing director of Overture Australia.
"The Australian staff will focus on sales, marketing and business development," Bohse told ZDNet Australia , adding there were currently five Overture Australia employees. "We will be building on the current team but we're not prepared to put any figures on how many we will be hiring."
Editorial and client services will be operated out of Overture's U.S. office in Pasadena. "[Editorial services are] when clients are submitting keywords and titles and URLs we make sure they are relevant to the search," said Bohse. "The reason paid listings work so well is the relevance."
Paid search listings are being seen as the best way to reach Net surfers, replacing the previous "must-have" of a listing in a directory service like Yahoo.
"We've been trying to educate [Australian business] with AltaVista...which we've been selling for a couple of years," said Bohse. "This market is fairly well educated. The small to medium enterprise market needs a little more education as to what is available."
"We already have clients here in Australia actively using Overture overseas, and we look forward to offering them a local product with AU eyeballs," said Bohse. "We've been talking to many of them over the last couple of weeks, telling them they will have a local service and they've been delighted."
"The advertisers that know Overture is going to launch in this market are very excited about it."
