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Ads By Microsoft

Microsoft to Put More Money Into MSN – New York Times

I’m surprised so many large companies are so slow to duplicate Google’s highly successful “Google Ads”. We developed the system for selecting appropriate ads to display on our livedoor.com pages and the biggest repository of Japanese blogs. Where we failed was not developing the other half of the system that allows anyone with a website to set up an advertisers account, so we were limited to only large advertisers and less specific ads, which diminishes the power of the advertising system. Why we were prevented from publishing such a complimentary system is still one of those upper management mysteries to me.

But what was obvious to me was that to start such a system you need to already possess one half of the system. You need, like we did, a huge repository of websites with a broad variety of content, such as blogs. This will attract advertisers to want to set up an account advertise with you, and start the ball rolling. Or, if you do not have the web content, you need the other half – a large repository of ads or advertisers, with which to tempt ad-hosting website owners. Microsoft has 7000 to start with, and due to the confidence building size of Microsoft, this will grow pretty quickly from Thursday, when they open there doors to all advertisers from “Barbara’s Home-Made Jam” to “Apple’s iPro Quadruple MacBook Mini”.

Like most services on the internet nowadays, the strength of this service, lies in the number of people using the service. More sign-ups lead to more sign-ups, the snowball rolls and becomes bigger.
But, I think that if Microsoft does not offer incentives for switching your advertising dollars from GoogleAds, it will not grow quick enough to be successful. Not having such a wide spread of both advertising hosts and advertisers, the match-making process between the two will not be as efficient. And as big a force as Microsoft is, they are going to have to work very hard to catch up with GoogleAds, which has become a veil drapped over most of the internet.