REDMOND, Washington: Microsoft Corp. is all set to launch its own system for selling advertisements alongside search results rivalling Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. The service is to be introduced by June in the United States.
The company has been testing its technology platform for the service, adCenter, during the last few months and currently 25 per cent of all the sponsored links displayed on the MSN Search are generated from this platform. It will be 100 per cent by the time the fiscal year ends for the company in June.
At present the advertisements are handled by Yahoo subsidiary Overture Services under an arrangement, which expires in June. Microsoft feels it is important to bring this work in-houses as it is a critically important segment to make money.
The company intends to make adCenter one of its crucial business units. Company officials say it will eventfully turn out to be a system facilitating advertisers to buy online advertising space on multiple platforms -- from its blogging sites to the Office Live system for offering business software and services online.
The company has set up adCenter Incubation Lab, or adLab, to oversee the project, it announced Thursday. The lab, a joint effort between Microsoft's researchers based in Redmond and experts in its Chinese research lab, is conducting hard core research to develop tools that would offer detailed demographic information enabling advertisers to focus their advertisements to intended target audience. The tools, according to the researchers involved in the project, will provide advertisers with a better sense of the age, gender and other traits of people who are viewing certain information online.
adLab has more than 50 researchers currently working on about 40 advertising technologies, the company said. Among the technologies is a "video hyperlink ad" that can detect a product displayed on a television commercial and a consumer can then zoom into the product and click through to a detailed description and information on where it can be bought.
According to market research data, Microsoft’s MSN search commands around 15 per cent of the search market, while Google has near about 40 per cent and AOL 10 per cent.
Posted
on : Sun, 15 Jan 2006 08:10 GMT | Business News
By : Chris Rowe
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