Microsoft's Adwords System launching today?

[intelliot]

This is big news for both advertisers and publishers. For advertisers, this opens
up a new source of traffic. From the article, the it looks like their system will
work much like the Google AdWords system, but check out this quote from the
article that makes the system stand out.

"Microsoft hopes its new advertising system will match many of the features of
Google's system, which is generally seen as more advanced than Yahoo's, and add a
few innovations. The most significant advancement in the MSN technology is its
ability to direct ads to viewers according to demographic characteristics, as
well as by the day and time the ad is shown.

For example, men searching for "roses" might see ads for florists' Web sites,
while women may see gardening-supply store ads.

... Google places ads on the search results page in order, based on which ad it
thinks will produce higher revenue. That means an advertisement with a lower bid
per click that gets clicked on much more often will be shown higher on Google's
pages. Microsoft is copying that Google method, except that it is adding
additional options to place separate bids for various demographic categories."

Here's the part that seems to indicate the Microsoft's version of AdSense will be
coming in the next few months.

"Microsoft also expects to use its new system to sell ads on other Web sites,
just as Yahoo and Google do with their systems."

"He said that once Microsoft had a large number of advertisers and had refined
its ad placement formulas, it would be able to compete with Google and Yahoo to
sell ads on other Web sites because it would be able to offer higher ad revenue."

The competition is heating up, and I feel that means more opportunities for
marketers like us, both on the advertising and publishing sides of things. People
in the YPN(Yahoo's version of AdSense) beta program are already reporting some
very good results after switching from AdSense. Please note that, this is more
likely to be noticed on topics that YPN is optimized for. My initial tests seem
to indicate the targeting was not as good as Google's AdSense. However, with the
heavy competition in this industry, I'm sure YPN engineers are working overtime
to polish up the system for the official YPN launch.

nytimes.com

[darrenstraight]

Yep I was reading that this morning at around the same time as me and broken were discussing about msn searches and something else!

Broken Shhhhhh!!!