First an adCenter update, and now this: Microsoft will come fashionably late to the content advertising party sometime this year when it launches the ingeniously-named – cue trumpet fanfare – ContentAds. Okay, so the moniker isn’t too exciting, but the news, first broken by JenSense, is. MSN will become the last of the search ‘big three’ to run a contextual ad net, and it looks like they’ll do so far sooner than anticipated.
Jen Slegg, who’ll speak at the Mix06 conference in March, happened across the information while checking out the confab’s other session speakers. She writes that it’s good MSN is coming merely late to the game rather than really, really late. After all, Yahoo! spotted Google two years before trying to bring the fight to AdSense, and have had difficulty getting traction; a second viable comer could be good for the market. Slegg continues:
While it is extremely likely ContentAds will only be in beta for a soft launch in 2006, similar to AdCenter starting off with a small beta, the fact that MSN is planning their program to launch relatively soon in the contextual advertising timeline is very good news to hear.
Hopefully the ContentAds soft launch won’t be too similar to adCenter’s, at least in the customer satisfaction department; ContentAds will face enough challenges because of simple tardiness without further complications from an adCenter-esque frustratingly designed user interface. Conversion Rater says that the big question is whether MSN’s advertiser base will be broad enough to make ContentAds relevant, and Threadwatch wants to see ContentAds bring something new to the table, other than Microsoft’s leverage. That would certainly be refreshing, but for now it’s good news that MSN is coming to the table at all.
