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MSN Takes on Google AdWords
kevmo writes "CNET News.com reports that Microsoft's MSN unit launched its own paid-search advertising program in France and said it plans to begin testing the system in the United States next month. FTA: "The system competes with Google's AdWords program and will eventually replace a keyword-based advertising program MSN contracts out to Yahoo. It has a simple user interface and is notable for its use of customer profiling, taking advantage of the data MSN gathers from its more than 9 million subscribers.""
What's in it for me to switch to MSN's?
Not to try to inflame any French /.tter, and I don't know much about the French, but wouldn't there be a significant difference between how the French or Americans surf? Like the kinds of stuff they look for, etc.
Just wondering why MS would test-run in France instead of some fixed part of the US.
The actual URL to Microsoft's MSN AdCenter:
adcenter.msn.com
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
You know, I am annoyed by the onslaught of Google articles on here, but maybe there are so many articles because they are great innovators. Google doesn't necessarally makes new software, but take an old idea and make it much better, or work in a different way that may or may not be more efficient.
People complain about Google possibly turning into another Microsoft, but I say that may not be a bad thing. Two giants with totally different ideas about engineering, research and design are now trying to grab a hold onto the same markets. There are similarities too; both companies to a lot of live testing with their consumers.
My revenue on google Adwords hasn't been all that great, so at least now if I desired, I could try a different option from a major provider. I like this and I'd hope to see more healthy competition between Google and Microsoft.
I wonder if better ad-targeting will mean higher pay-per-click for the publishers? Not that anyone will dare discuss their Adsense earnings, for fear of having their account cancelled.
on linux/solaris/non-Windows non-IIS webservers? are they implemented as active-x's so they'd only work in IE?
>taking advantage of the data MSN gathers from its more than 9 million subscribers
We're not going to be farmed for energy by soulless machines...
We're going to be farmed for our metadata by soulless corporations!
I feel so much better now.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Despite my normal anti-Microsoft stance on the world in general, this type of information usage is going to happen no matter what we as users want. The worst case is the governments of the world using personally identifying information in similar kinds of ways.
:)
Since I don't think it can be stopped any easier than spam-email can be stopped altogether, I want to make my online profile seem as non-descript as possible. That is to say that I don't want to be part of a 'demographic'. That probably means I'll get lumped in with people that buy things I don't want or am allergic to. This is all the more reason to not use MSN... to avoid becoming a user in a demographic. We don't allow the government to use racial profiling... this is just cyber profiling in my opinion, and far worse that standard advertisement campaigns.
Of course the French will have differing demographic and cyber values than people in North America... we won't be looking to buy white flags
Despite the jokes, does anyone know of software or companies that specifically work to help a user maintain anonymity in the face of this type of information usage?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I think it's safe to say that Google has firmly cornered this particular market. Microsoft has had success playing the catch-up game in the past, but I think this time the lag is going to cost them.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
How viable/likely would it be to contact a large information broker such as Google and get them to delete personal information about yourself? A lot of people probably have information stored in Google that they would prefer wasn't available to the public.
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
I have an adwords account as well, one of the possibilities might be that the MSN market would generate more revenue? Consider that the users who use Google might be smarter than the ones on MSN due to the fact that those people who don't know how to change the default homepage after installing windows might be a viable market to advertise to :)
Microsoft: Who do you want us to copy today?
Microsoft: Innovation Through Imitation.
Microsoft: Developers. Developers. Developers. We are happy with our halfassed developers.
Microsoft: Screw new ideas, we have a monkey boy.
It has a simple user interface and is notable for its use of customer profiling, taking advantage of the data MSN gathers from its more than 9 million subscribers.
.NET Passports will have the data taken from the passports in order to serve more relevant ads? If so, does this mean that web site owners will have the ability to look and see what data the .NET Passports hold?
Does this mean that people logged into their
Good to see Microsoft is still Innovative.
Surprising for such monolithic company to still have new and fresh ideas.
You would think a large company, like Microsoft, would use it position to exert pressure to adopt their services.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
no comment
MS needs to be put in their place, and to a small degree Google has been doing that. It will be interesting to see for how long Google can withstand MS's onslaught.
Ignore Alien Orders
Finally, click fraud victim we can all feel good about. .
The only acceptable defense of scientific results is to say that they were the product of the Scientific Method.
Google share price rises ever so slightly
Microsoft taking on Google... first casualty is Yahoo... meanwhile Google fails to notice any impact... 9 million MSN subscribers is peanuts compared to number of people who use google
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
do NOT welcome our new MSN AdWord overlords
You could probably get some real mileage off of using people's desktop searchs to make a profile and suggest products and services to people when they search their own files.
Great feature for Longhorn, err. Vista and could allow MS to drop the buy price a lot.
http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/innovation/
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Maybe I don't pay enough attention to their various projects but it seems to me that Google has been churning out complex projects at, for a large development company, breakneck speed.
Even if most of those projects are still in Beta, all the ones I've tried are very functional and stable. While there are other companies who have similar products or projects that are more functional or establised, Google's ability and flexibility should have them all scrambling to innovate or to defend their market share.
Funny thing is, I've only become aware of a lot of these established competitors BECAUSE of Google's projects. If it weren't for Google Desktop search, I may never have heard of Copernic - which is a pretty darned good program.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Adwords used to be a great thing for small-time advertisers and that's precisely the reason that myself and many other small advertisers like me used adwords. I could reach thousands on a budget of less than $100 a day.
.20 on many of my keywords. Not anymore. I can't afford $5-10 a click so I cancelled my adwords campaigns. Judging by some of the angry threads at webmaster world I'm guessing that there's hundreds of others out there like me. Maybe Google just needs something to show for thier inflated stock price.
Google changed their minimum-bid policy and now I have to end up paying $10 a click for some keywords and no less than $1 to get on the first result page for others. I used to get up near the top for less than
If MSN can offer a decent amount of quality traffic for a good CPC I'll jump all over it.
I probably should have read the fine print when signing up to Slashdot. Now all my base belong to... ah screw it.
(Australian working in the UK, reading Slashdot)
To compete with Google, M$ farms out its keyword based advertising program to yahoo, and yahoo farms out its search biz to......drum roll please..... Google. How much did they lose on the last XBox ?
MS makes a valid point in claiming that they have a better knowledge of WHO the user is. Having a profile of the searcher helps create better, more-targetted ad choices. That way users see more relevant ads, advertisers get more click-throughs and purchases, and the adserving company gains more revenue. I wonder if Google will use GMail and search history to change its ad targetting. GMail would seem to offer an interesting opportunity to segment users/searchers into psychographic groups that are far more useful than profile data (e.g. age, occupation, etc.)
It would be interesting to do side-by-side searches from two computers used by two different heavy GMail users (or a GMail-user and non-GMail-user) with very different interests (and e-mail contents). It might reveal if Google is using GMail for profiling and changing its ads to suit what it thinks the user might want. One could also do tests to see if prior search history influences Google's ad choices in future searches.
Search (or advertizing) is actually a dialog between the user and the search engine (or advertizer), and the better the search engine/ad-server understands the user, the better for everyone.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Selling snake oil just got profitable again. People like you rock.
The majority of adwords are inserted by web developers. Will the development community use Microsoft adwords, even though, the majority dislike Microsoft because of their failure to update IE? With the already established Google adwords, it seems it would take a lot to get web developers to begin using a Microsoft product. ( I know, IE 7 is on its way ... and I really hope it lives up to its promises. )
"Microsoft is just stealing ideas!" "Google will kick their butt!" "Google is my pal and I'll never use MSN!"
Whatever, the fundamental fact remains that publicly traded companies are not your friend. They are big companies driven by profit and accountability to shareholders. The concern for the individual is ZERO regardless of what cute corporate motto they might have.
The darlings of slashdot won't come to your rescue without profit being involved. Google won't save you, and you're fools to want them to. Apple hasn't fixed the fundamental problems of OSX and the move to intel has delayed optimization and improved performance for months to years, they aren't friends either.
Sure this is a little off topic, but as threads degenerate into flames for on publicly traded monolith and accolades for another, it's important to keep perspective that basically all publicly traded companies are the same.
Google isn't innovating either. They've acquired Picassa, Keyhole and others. GoogleTalk is just jabber repackaged. This community tends to laude those efforts as though Google continues to be a haven of innovation. That remains to be seen. Their innovation comes in repackaging acquisitions and open standards anymore. MSFT just rebuilds what they see, how is it really that different?
BUY PCs? What kind of nerd BUYS PCs? I mean, besides Mac nerds? I build my own PCs and run Linux on them.
Microsoft hasn't gotten a dime from me since 1998.
F'king nerd wannabes, I swear...
The news is only the latest in the software giant's plans to rely more on advertising. Microsoft also plans to offer more advertising-related software, particularly now that MSN is being folded into the platform development group, Hadley said. For example, the company already sells a version of Microsoft Money that has advertisements in it, he said.
Why the fuck would someone want to purchase a MS product, only to be shown advertisements in it?
MSN search engine is the easiest for SEO.
.. where frankly you will never resurface again) .. Such is the GoogleDance.
Doesn't make sense to have a paid-for-click scheme.
Google ok, granted, takes almost 2 years for your website to show up in the top 50 - even for very specific keyword searches.
What is pretty ironically, is that a website which is compliant,
whose html tags are semantic and even offers greater accessibility scores very very high on MSN Searches.
Not for Google - for that, what matter is time, ever-changing content and a number of high PR links (but not too many links in case Google classes you as a spammer and throws your website into a running sandbox
For people that just can't be bothered with the insania Google Adwords is a neat (even profitable) solution.
Well i guess copying is the sincerest form of flattering. Microsoft seems to be flattering everything in sight theese days.
They sure are a flirty company.
HTTP/1.1 400
Because if Microsoft's history proves right, they will throw money at the problem, and that means money for *me*. If I dispay the MS "Adwords" equivalent on my site instead of the Google ads, I can take a bigger commission because Microsoft will give more money per click or impression or however they will do it, and that translates into me being able to have a better site for my end users.
We will see how the implementation goes, and how the rate structure may help my site.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
So who will bring in more customers, again?
I don't mind google advertising from my gmail and advertising using my search keyword, but microsoft?
Using personal information in software to target ads to a consumer (not even based on the public content they're looking at).... yep, sounds like spyware to me. If I'm not mistaken, Congress was looking to outlaw spyware. Not that it would affect Microsoft at all, since they own the government. =/
A community-oriented lyrics site
I use google adword a ton for www.zoomshare.com, and think it is probably the best PPC service on the planet given that we are a free service and the ROI is ZERO!!. Now that I said that I would love to see what Microsoft could do with a PPC service because Overture is mainly for Yahoo. If AOL is brought by Microsoft as some reports have it then this could be a huge step for MS. Where does all of this leave overture(Yahoo)?
According to this advertisers can target their campaign by age and gender.
My understanding is that, when some information about the user is available (i.e. they signed in as passport users) their personal data is used to better target the ads.
Moreover, MSN search could track which kind of ads you clicked in the past or which kind of pages you usually visit and use this information to deliver even better targeted ads.
On the other hand, MSN already collects demographic information about the visitors of their sites, not only age and gender, but also other random things like education, occupation, marital status, income, online shopping etc...
so they could use also this information in the future.
Fabio
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