Microsoft testing its answer to AdSense
By Jason Menayan July 18th, 2008
Although its advertising base is not nearly as impressive as Google’s (AdWords/AdSense) and Yahoo’s (Search Marketing/Publisher Network), Microsoft has been private beta-testing its contextual ad network for publishers over the last few months, and continues to invite new publishers to its program. No word yet on when they plan to take the program public, but any entry by Microsoft at the very least means it plans on throwing a lot of money at publishers to bootstrap a network.
Yahoo’s current problems might present an opportunity for Microsoft Live, since even Yahoo is able to garner premium rates on a wide range of branded and popular search terms, in the first few positions. On the advertiser side, Microsoft has been able to roll out demographic and time-of-day targeting, as well as optimization support, so it has probably geared itself up infrastructurally to boost its inventory-growth capabilities through its own home-grown publisher network.
It is possible that its purchase of aQuantive last year might give Microsoft access to advertisers interested in trying contextual advertising through their existing relationship with aQuantive. That might help solve the chicken-and-egg problem Microsoft faces in building a sizeable contextual ad network in the face of heavily-dominant Google and YPN.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 20th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Msft and yhoo need a game changer at this point to compete well with google on both the publisher and advertiser side. One interesting are is semantic advertising where ads are targeted by page meaning vs random keywords on a page. This could be very appealing to advertisers especially when coming from one of the large palyers in the field. Not sure where MS, Yahoo and AOL are in the game but this will def. be an interesting area to see who will come out with a first commercial application of this sort and potentially lead this new era of internet advertising.
Will it be google again??…
July 21st, 2008 at 10:17 am
Thanks, Jeff. True, Msft and Yahoo need to offer something substantially different and better to AdSense to lure advertisers and publishers. Maybe we’ll see one of them purchase Proximic or Peer39, two companies we’ve written about in this blog. I’m not sure, though, if semantic matching is a game-changer or a step-change in terms of making online advertising more efficient, though.
August 10th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
I don’t see how Microsoft is planning on distinguishing itself from Google here. Other than a different interface to set things up, it seems like the net result on your page will be roughly the same, a few lines of ads. And if you compare side by side, I can’t imaging Microsoft ads yielding a higher RPM unless Microsoft were to give a much larger cut of the advertisers’ dollars to the publisher. Even with doing this, the fact that there is far less advertiser competition on Microsofts Platform means there still might be enough to entice publishers away from AdSense.