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! Microsoft announced what was probably a huge advertising deal with Facebook just last week. my comment : I hope its not like YPN when it comes to targeting
That's great news mate, thanks for sharing. I hope that ContentAds have better targeting than YPN and that they open up to the world as opposed to YPN.
Great news... I always am stoked about some more legitimate copetition for G! and Y! Can't wait for the invite to start in on this.. Eric
so, finally someone is here to compete against Adsense. It wouldn't be a piece of cake though! Also, whats the url of Microsoft's ContentAds? How can one request for invitation?
I really hope this is not another "only for US residents". But, i'm expecting their rates to suck anyway.
Since advertisers typically pay less for their clicks on MSN Adcenter than on google adwords; its very likely that this system will end up paying publishers less than adwords. So I'm not getting too excited about it !
I also would like to see this. Microsoft "inventions" are always interesting and it's another toy I can play with.