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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.""
The actual URL to Microsoft's MSN AdCenter:
adcenter.msn.com
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
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.
Quality and Security.
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?
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Didn't Google have high profile legal troubles with France? 1 2 and the famous 3 Perhaps MSFT chose France because it seems the less Google-happy place on earth.
The Splintered Mind - Overcoming
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
I use AdWords on a few websites... What's in it for me to switch to MSN's?
Well, I'm unsure if you mean you advertise on a few websites or put ads on your your own websites for revenue. But, I've done a lot of work in the industry so here goes:
Google and Yahoo have a roughly equal share of the keyword-based advertising market (roughly 45% a piece), and most of the traffic comes from their own search engines, not their content network. The launch of MSN's program will imediatley cut into Yahoo's share (as current MSN ads are contracted to them), not Google's. It's hard to predict just how much though - Microsoft's search engine is less popular with a smaller index (and technicaly inferior IMHO), but Microsfot is pushing it pretty hard, and they own a fair number of hugely popular sites (MSNBC, Hotmail, ect). If you're targeting a specific demographic or website owned by MS, you'll have to consider them. But I don't see the major distributions out there flocking to an unproven system by a fairly new player to the search industry.
Between Google and Yahoo, I don't see overall differences in advertiser/advertisee ROI, but the two systems work slightly differently and could be quite different to a smaller operation. Where you place in Yahoo is based on how much you're willing to spend, where placement in Google is determined by a combination of the traffic you generate and your bid.
Bottom line, if you're only toying with AdWords at the moment, I wouldn't bother with MSN until you've experimented with Yahoo.
Surely you don't want to switch, you want to use both! Thereby increasing the amount of adverts your product has! :)
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.