MSN is testing its own contextual advertising system

    The third major player will soon appear on the contextual advertising market. By Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network is going to join the company Microsoft, which started public testing ContentAds platform.

    According to Western bloggers, Microsoft began to send out the first invitations to test the ContentAds platform, which allows you to place contextual advertising on partner sites.

    The fact that Microsoft is developing the ContentAds platform became known in February 2006 , when developers from the MSN adCenter division reported this at a technology conference .. However, they said that the new platform will be released before the end of this year.

    And the long-awaited day has come. Yesterday, Microsoft began sending out invitations to websites that have a chance to become ContentAds contextual advertising sites. During the pilot testing, the program will be tested primarily on the sites of the MSN portal , as well as on selected partners. Among the partners may be a large social network Facebook , with which the other day an agreement was concluded .

    According to the developers, when choosing an ad for display, the ContentAds contextual advertising system takes into account not only the content of the page where the advertising module is located, but also the age of visitors to this page and their place of residence (possibly all this information comes from the MS Passport system ). In other words, the ContentAds engine supports demographic and geographic targeting. Advertisers can place their ads with all these factors in mind and trade with each other for keywords. If you believe the preliminary description of the system, then it will be even more technological than AdSense, since the latter does not support demographic targeting.

    Apparently, the ContentAds engine is quite ready for commercial operation and its official launch will take place very soon. The exact launch date is not reported. It is possible that it will take place in late 2006 or early 2007.

    Increasing competition between the Google AdSense contextual advertising platforms, Yahoo Publisher Network and ContentAds is beneficial for both site owners and advertisers. Firstly, competition will stimulate the technical development of these systems and the emergence of new features. Secondly, competition between advertising providers can lead to higher revenue for advertising sites.

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