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The affiliate and PPC conference world is likely to start humming along once again now that Microsoft has pulled back the curtains on their new advertising system. MSN's new paid-search engine -- adCenter -- was officially introduced today at Microsoft's Strategic Account Summit. The tool is still in prototype and a pilot program will be held in Singapore and France to gather customer feedback. Here's MSN's press release on the announcement. Don't get too excited -- the pilot program is schedule to launch in the next six months. And, Microsoft's contract with Yahoo doesn’t expire until June 2006. My guess is the MSN platform tool will be ready in plenty of time for the holiday rush of 2005. The future hasn't stopped bloggers and other industry experts from chiming in now on the impact this tool is likely to have on the search wars. Clearly, the most exciting aspect of Microsoft's new PPC platform is the ability to target based on gender, age, and location from information Microsoft has captured over the years. Just what will it mean to the PPC affiliate army of advertisers and merchants waiting to fine-tune their ad campaigns based on the ability tailor buy using audience demographics? Let's not even get into the argument about the value of consumer information captured on websites especially if acquired consumer information is not linked to a credit card transaction. And, how old is this data?? As you may guess my view on ad buys based on registration data is of little value. Let's just toss that discussion to the sidelines for a minute, and chat about cost per click prices. I believe we'll start to see higher bids for two-word phrases in the short term on all the engines in part due to current advertisers protecting their positions, more advertisers coming into the market and, as advertisers jump on the new MSN bandwagon to test out their new offering. I believe Yahoo's PPC engine prices are likely to experience a slight decline as volume levels decrease. It's likely that Yahoo will start to lower the cumulative number of ad views for PPC slots in the coming months to stay ahead of the curve. ISP, web hosting, and Internet service categories may well take the hardest hit. Google's fate rests with the ease of use of MSN's new tool. If the tool is intuitive with easy to access reports and billing information on both a cumulative and by day part performance level by keyword by ad group, then Google is in for a serious fight that will be played out over the next two years. That's right. Two years. The shift will happen fast -- if it does. Here's something to think about... Microsoft made a mistake by passively entering the search world. Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, noted last year at the Summit that not having a proprietary search engine was a mistake. Mr. Ballmer is certainly making up for lost time and appears ready to take MSN to the search battlefield. He's just two years behind. Please post your comments below. Many thanks, Comments (1) + TrackBacks (0) | Category:
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Adam Viener
1. Rob McMillin on March 20, 2005 3:15 PM writes...
Uh... well... what about the demand side? Wake me when MSN actually has something like the number of page views Google has. Nobody I know trusts MS to leave search results untrammeled. One thing Google can absolutely rest upon is their reputation for keeping paid search results separate from the other ones; MS has been known to demand to put, shall we say, other things before what the broad web community might have picked. Granted, Google isn't flawless and can be gamed, but MS has never put anything between them and making a buck. (Remember Microsoft's proposal a few years back to "add value" by changing rendered links on downloaded pages?)
Google may have its problems, but at least they have their "don't be evil" commandment to live up to, whether they do all the time or not. Microsoft, on the other hand, took the "don't" out a long time ago, and works hard at being evil every day. Which brings me to the next point: Microsoft doesn't really care whose toes they step on, not even their own (present-day) customers'. What that means is, they historically have seen no limits to what their business really is. Dollars per click is immaterial if you're MS; what you care about is injecting yourself into the transaction, a la eBay. If there's money to be made (and here, Im thinking actual e-commerce), MS wants ownership of the virtual mall under which that happens. That's where the real money's being made, and that's where MS will encounter stiff resistance from a myriad of midsized e-tailers.
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