Microsoft builds advertising role

Redmond giant announces strategy for context-sensitive advertising revenues

Microsoft has detailed its strategy to loosen Google’s stranglehold on web advertising placed by search criteria.

At a Seattle conference for advertisers, Microsoft showed off its new AdCenter platform. As with other context-sensitive advertising schemes, AdCenter auctions words so that adverts will be displayed when users search on related topics.

The platform has already been phased in to serve all of Microsoft’s paid US, French and Singaporean search traffic and will be introduced to the UK with pilot advertisers from next month. Microsoft sees AdCenter playing a role across Windows Live online services and XBox, as well as the MSN network.

“With the experience behind them with the US pilot, I wouldn’t expect that the UK pilot would last very long before fully launching,” wrote Jennifer Slegg on the SearchEngineWatch blog. “But having a summer target date for testing is something many potential publishers will be watching for when the ads begin running on MSN and [other Microsoft] sites.”

More broadly, Microsoft is gearing up for a blitz on the online sector, with plans to spend an additional $2bn on research and development.

Also last week, Microsoft Live.com became the search component of Amazon’s A9 search aggregation service.

However, Google has recently been extending its lead in search usage and revenues against all its main rivals, raising expectations that other online giants, including Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay and AOL, could form alliances.