adCenter Goes Live, The Race Is On
Thursday, May 4th, 2006 at 4:34 pm by Jeffrey Perren, AC Magazine
With rumors flying about talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! for some kind of partnership and yeterday’s announcement of adCenter going live, Microsoft is clearly going after Google in a big way.
That’s not news, of course; Microsoft has been gunning for Google for almost ten years. They didn’t seem poised to do much about it, however, until recently. Well, “recently” has become now.
It’s a safe bet that adCenter is going to add substantially to Microsoft’s revenues, and largely at Google’s market share expense. And as Ballmer, et al, gear up for this summer’s contextual ad beta program, that competition can only become more intense.
As with most competition between large, aggressive, and skilled companies whoever wins or loses, affiliates will profit. adCenter gives affiliates another outlet for PPC. One which, in this case, has somewhere between 10% and 15% of the traffic. Ten percent is small compared to Google’s near 50%, but 10% of a very large number is still… you guessed it, very large.
Also, Microsoft has a history of starting behind yet coming on strong. (Windows, Office, SQL Server… the list is endless.) With Ballmer’s announcement of plans to spend over $1 billion on R&D for ad-related products this year, that effort has some muscle behind it. Some horses are like that. They often win Kentucky Derby races. And this promises to be some horse race.
Place your bets, ladies and gentleman and good luck to all.
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