Microsoft’s long awaited contextual advertising platform, named ContentAds, sent out the first invitations today to prospective participants in its pilot program. Starting on “primarily” (their word) MSN owned sites, Microsoft says that ContentAds will place advertisements using not just keywords but also demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools. Sounds like AdSense plus some consideration of the demographics of various MSN sites’ readership - we’ll see what happens when ContentAds are released into the wild. We’ll probably see soon.
More big time competition for Google’s AdSense, Yahoo! Publisher Network and the other players in the field should mean higher revenue cuts for publishers and more innovation in the way ads are served. That’s the theory anyway, though Microsoft’s late and safe entry into the game leaves open the question of whether there will be much innovation here. Come on Microsoft - surprise us!
Online ad expert Jennifer Slegg, who got an invitation, broke the news (I found via) and predicts Microsoft’s entry will be especially good news for small publishers without millions of impressions per month.
Microsoft announced what was probably a huge advertising deal with Facebook just last week.
Update: Microsoft’s Don Dodge is of the belief that this new ad product will have better click fraud protection than Google or Yahoo! That would be very cool.
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Looks like another Google/Yahoo competitor!
Hey Yahoo Publisher Network! Are you paying attention?!
Shame on you for not innovating in more than a year …. Microsoft is going to eat your lunch…
I like this. I’m not really a fan of Microsoft but the increased competition in the paid search space hopefully will benefit ad buyers from a pricing perspective but we’ll see. Google and Yahoo/Overture have been minting money the last few years on the backs of many smaller businesses who don’t have too many other choices for getting exposure on the Internet. As a Google Adwords advertiser as well as Yahoo/Overture advertiser, I have never been impressed with how these two companies have handled click fraud over the years. In my personal experience, md advertising ROI has continued to erode on both of these paid search engines over the last few years. I’m not implying that Microsoft will do any better in this regard but having more choices is a good thing.
For someone whose Adsense account was disabled, more competition in online advertising especially from biggies is great news.
“sent out the first invitations today to prospective participants in its pilot program.”!!!
Correction: It definitely is not the first time they are sending out the invites. I received it almost 7 months back.
Nag. B
Let the games begin. Hopefully blogs with minimum traffic and struggling entrepreneur can benefit for the ContentAds. Everyone should benefit from the web! Remember content is still king or queen.
This is good news for advertisers and publishers alike. The more choice they have, the more power is at their disposal.
It’s also a proof that contextual advertising seems to be here to stay. I just wonder what’s going to happen to micro players (although I suspect that the specialized ones will survive)?
Where can I signup for the waiting list?
Ya… my same question as to where do i signup for the beta invitation?
If Microsoft can deliver what they say with this ad network, Google will really face some serious competition and just as google is targeting MS Office with its Google applications, MS is targeting Google’s biggest revenue stream.
wouldn’t it be great if MS offered free version of their operating system (a LITE version) and offer contextual ads for their revenue?
Just a thought
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Where can I signup for the waiting list?
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I hope they blow Google Adsense out of the water. Adsense is a scam! They removed our account with over $500 in it saying they linked our account to another account that was removed due to fraudulent activity. The only problem is I only have one account so how can it be linked to another account that had fraudulent activity? I asked for a more detailed explanation and the name on this so called account and was told they don’t need to provide any further information and that to do so would give away secret information about their security.
What garbage. I hope AdSense implodes and dies. I smell a class action lawsuit for Google because from what I’ve heard I’m not the only one who’s had their account closed with a good amount of money in it. $700-800 doesn’t sound like much but that’s a months worth of advertising revenue gone for a small site like mine.
Hey everyone -
Just want to emphasize that we’re inviting advertisers to participate in an early beta of Microsoft adCenter Content Ads — a new advertising product that will place relevant ads on web pages. Invitations will be rolling out to current adCenter customers over the next few weeks and months. We have plans to release a program for publishers in 2007… but this beta invitation is focused on the advertising platform.
When we have the URL up for advertisers to register interest in our Beta (should be up early next week), I’ll comment with the link.
This should provide some interesting competition which is good for both the advertisers and publishers. But they should bring in even more innovation to convince publishers to mover over to them.
Actually sounds very interesting to me… and can’t wait until I have a chance to try it out. I use YPN now, and only wish that the ads were more relevant to the content in my site and posts.
well…
…all good…
….as long as I can block the ads….
re: “my advertising ROI has continued to erode on both of these paid search engines over the last few years”
Steve, my experience is the same. I’ve been using both services for 5 years. The last year, in particular, my ROI has gone done by almost 30%. Be interesting to see if the microsoft solution can help revserse the trend.
Although it is a good intent of MS to catch-up with Google AdWords offering, given the new features such as demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding, I consider they will need to present a more compelling reason to convince online advertiser to use AdCenter by bringing more innovation to the table in terms of ROI. One challenge for MS would to manage better Click Fraud than competitors. This problem is still costing advertisers between $1.3 billion and $1.8 billion a year.
Another factor against MS is search traffic. According to the last July Nielsen/Net Ratings, MSN search ranking dropped down 3% from last year to 9.6% compared to Google 49.2% share.
Let’s see how the market receives this new revamped version of MS AdCenter. Only time will tell.
Mr Schmidt,
I’m sure you must be shitting in your pants now.
The easy stuff is to get on APPL board and some cross dealing ( advertising on ipod ?? , dare you spoil sending those ED/PE ads on that tiny cute scree) OK stock market noted that point.
Can you please update all those poor GOOG share holders on what your counter action will be ( apart from banning from contacting with google) ?
The real fun starts now - Right time for the tech/mgmt authors to follow and write an incredible story ( the same old stroy how MSFT killed a new upstart).
Kora
It is nice to see MS innovating here. When I received a letter saying that they were distributing half of their cash position back to investors, I was starting to get worried ; p
Martin Tibbitts
http://www.kangaekata.com
I look forward to trying it out.
Contacting the MSN Sales team to place ads on their content sites was highly impractical for small companies… I expect a self-serve solution will kick up the ad volume.
It is definately a good news for publisher, but hope their beta will end soon.
Anything which loosens Google’s grip on the contextual advertising market place is good news. I think Google have developed a contemptious ‘can’t touch us’ type of attitute towards some of their publishers, advertisers and rivals. It’d be nice if they got knocked-down a peg or two.
Google adsense is awful!
They’ve taken away $300,000 worth of revenue due to invalid clicks.
There were no invalid clicks.
We plan to go for a class action. Anyone here want to join?