Will Microsoft launch an Adense competitor targeted at bloggers
All the webs abuzz over the news that Microsoft’s MSN is launching its own website advertising service.
The new service, initially to be launched as part of MSN Search, is said to target ads in a superior way to Google by allowing advertisers to aim ads on Web search pages to users based on their sex, age or location, presumably by cookies planted in users computers as part of the process of using other MSN service such as Hotmail and Spaces.
If it is cookie driven though, it would, in theory be expandable to any website, and therefore blogs as well. Certainly the success of Google’s Adsense is providing advertising to millions of smaller sites and blogs has played an important role not only in bringing in more advertisers to Google (through exposure and more choice), but also in terms of revenue as well. Certainly with Yahoo! expanding YPN into blogs (currently in US only beta testing) it would seem natural that MSN, if the technology and ad deliver is as good as initial reports say, would be looking to expand into blog advertising as well.
My prediction: you’ll see MSN advertising on blogs by Q4 2006.