Smaaz’s Blog

Microsoft and Digg.com Team Up

Digg.com and Microsoft today announced an agreement in which the two companies will collaborate to bring relevant advertising to the more than 17 million unique monthly visitors to Digg, an innovative Web site that harnesses the collective wisdom of the world’s online audience to prioritize the overwhelming amount of content available on the Web. Microsoft’s advanced advertising technology and sales force combined with Digg’s unique and growing user community make possible the three-year collaboration, grounded in the companies’ commitment to technological innovation and user experience.

As part of the relationship, Microsoft will be the exclusive provider of display and contextual advertising on Digg. The two companies also agreed to work together on future technology and advertising initiatives. 

“Our collaboration with Digg is about bringing our advertising technology and sales force to one of the fastest-growing sites on the Web and a true innovator in user-generated content,” said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft. “We believe advertisers will welcome Microsoft and Digg’s combined strengths to forge more meaningful connections online.”

Microsoft and Federated Media Publishing, Digg’s current advertising partner, plan to collaborate to bring integrated programs to Digg’s users and advertisers. “Federated Media has unique advertising sales assets that dovetail with our efforts, and we look forward to working with them,” Berkowitz said. 

“We’re now positioned to provide a world-class advertising solution that builds upon Digg’s philosophy of providing a great experience for users and advertisers,” said Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg. “As the Digg audience continues to grow and diversify, we believe that this initiative with Microsoft, and the resources that it provides, will enable us to focus less on developing an advertising infrastructure and more on developing new and innovative features for the site.”

The companies expect to begin execution of the agreement in the coming weeks.

July 25th, 2007

Microsoft Announces Enhanced Privacy Protections

Expanding on its ongoing work to help protect customer privacy, Microsoft announced an enhanced set of privacy principles for Live Search and online advertising data collection, use and protection. The principles outline new, enhanced steps to help protect the privacy of Microsoft Windows Live users, including making search query data anonymous after 18 months by permanently removing cookie IDs, the entire IP address and other identifiers from search terms.

Microsoft will also work to give customers more control over what information it uses to personalize their online search experience. In connection with its efforts to support a common industry approach to privacy issues, Microsoft also announced that it will join the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) later this year when it begins to offer third-party ad serving broadly.

“We have been thinking deeply about privacy related to search and online advertising and believe it is critical to evolve our privacy principles,” said Peter Cullen, chief privacy strategist at Microsoft. “We believe our enhanced principles should be part of the industry dialogue on this issue and that keeping these issues as simple as possible for consumers is the best approach. For instance, on search data, anonymous should mean anonymous.”

July 25th, 2007

comScore Releases June U.S. Search Engine Rankings

comScore today released its monthly comScore qSearch analysis of activity across competitive search engines.  In June 2007, Google Sites maintained its spot atop the rankings with 49.5 percent of the U.S. search market.  Yahoo! Sites captured second place with 25.1 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (13.2 percent), Ask Network (5.0 percent) and Time Warner Network (4.2 percent).

• Americans conducted 8.0 billion searches online in June, up 6 percent versus May and up 26 percent versus June 2006.
• Google Sites led the pack with 4.0 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (1.1 billion), Ask Network (403 million), and Time Warner Network (341 million).  Despite declining in search market share in June, both Google Sites and Yahoo! Sites enjoyed increases in search query volume.
• Microsoft Sites experienced a significant increase in search query volume (up 36 percent) and search market share (up 2.9 share points) in June, due in large part to Live Search Club, a program launched by Microsoft in late May to engage and reward users of Live Search.

July 17th, 2007

Microsoft Adds Ask Sponsored Listings to Office Live

Microsoft® Office Live today announced that it is adding Ask Sponsored Listings to its adManager Beta search advertising service. adManager enables small businesses to purchase and manage search-based keyword advertising easily and affordably directly from the Microsoft Office Live platform. Ask Sponsored Listings joins the MSN® network and Live Search as distribution sources for Microsoft Office Live customers’ search ads.

Ask Sponsored Listings (ASL) is an automated, open-auction system that allows search marketers to purchase, manage and optimize pay-per-click and contextual advertising campaigns on the ASL publisher network, including Ask.com.

As more consumers are making purchase decisions online, search marketing has emerged as a $15.8 billion global industry, and experts expect it to grow to $44.5 billion over the next five years. Search is also the second most commonly used application on the Web, with 550 million searches daily in the United States, according to Piper Jaffray & Co.* Local search is also catching on as more businesses want to be able to target their ads to a specific region; in 2006, local search accounted for approximately 15 percent of total online ad spending.** adManager is heeding these trends by offering small businesses a solution to develop a national or locally targeted search-engine advertising campaign in no time that can be managed across multiple search engines.

“We are very excited about the integration of Ask Sponsored Listings, as this provides more options for our small businesses to market their companies and attract new customers,” said Baris Cetinok, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft Office Live. “Adding Ask Sponsored Listings to our adManager service gets us one step closer to our goal of providing small businesses with an all-inclusive search engine marketing service.”

Cetinok continued, “Many small businesses feel that search engine marketing is a complicated and expensive process, and we want to demonstrate to our customers, especially those without a lot of time or budget, that pay-per-click advertising on adManager can be simple and affordable. adManager will help our small businesses promote their companies to the millions out there using the Internet to search for products and services.”

James Speer, general manager of search marketing at IAC Advertising Solutions, said, “The Ask Sponsored Listings search advertising network reaches over 59 million monthly unique users. The integration of Ask Sponsored Listings with Microsoft Office Live makes it easy for marketers to extend their pay-per-click ad campaigns to our publisher network.”

Search ads are text-based ads displayed on a search results page. They look very similar to search results displayed in the main body of the page; however, they are labeled as advertisements. To start the search engine marketing process, businesses can bid on keywords related to their services and products; their ad then has the potential of appearing when customers submit keyword searches on the Internet. Advertisers are charged only when their ad is clicked, which makes search advertising highly efficient.

adManager facilitates the pay-per-click advertising process for small businesses. Once a small business sets up an account with adManager, it can immediately select keywords to create its ads and set its bid amounts. adManager will work within the company’s budget, as well as target the campaign at the local or national level. In addition, the service will show results through detailed reports that describe which keywords are driving customers to the advertiser’s Web site.

July 17th, 2007

New click quality reports in Microsoft adCenter

The latest release of adCenter includes exciting ways to improve advertiser visibility into the area of click quality. Because all clicks don’t necessarily carry the same value, adCenter categorizes them as either standard quality or low quality. Standard-quality clicks are the clicks that you want, that ordinarily result in conversions, and that you are billed for. 

Low-quality clicks are clicks that adCenter classifies as non-billable, including those that adCenter has identified as:

• Invalid clicks
• Clicks that have characteristics of low or unclear commercial intent
• Clicks that exhibit patterns of unusual activity
• Clicks that originate from spiders, robots, questionable sources, or test servers
• Clicks that should be filtered out for other reasons

Some traffic that adCenter has flagged as low quality might ultimately result in conversions for you, which is why the label “low quality,” rather than “invalid,” provides a more accurate description of this class of traffic.

July 6th, 2007

Microsoft Agrees To Make Changes To Vista

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to its Windows Vista operating system in response to a complaint by Google that a feature of Vista is anticompetitive, lawyers involved in the case said on Tuesday.

Google had filed a 49-page document with the Justice Department in April claiming that Windows Vista’s desktop search is anti-competitive because it is difficult to disable and, when Vista’s search runs in tandem with Google’s desktop search product, Google’s product slows to a crawl.

June 20th, 2007

Microsoft to Acquire Ad Company for $6 billion

Microsoft today announced it will acquire aQuantive, Inc., for $66.50 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $6 billion. This deal expands upon the Company’s previously outlined vision to provide the advertising industry with a world class, Internet-wide advertising platform, as well as a set of tools and services that help its constituents generate the highest possible return on their advertising investments.

The aQuantive acquisition enables Microsoft to strengthen relationships with advertisers, agencies and publishers by enhancing the Company’s world-class advertising platforms and services beyond its current capabilities to serve MSN. The acquisition also provides Microsoft increased depth in building and supporting next generation advertising solutions and environments such as cross media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV. Combining aQuantive’s technologies and services with Microsoft’s portfolio will provide value for the industry’s key constituencies as follows:

• Advertisers and ad agencies will benefit from a world-class media planning, buying and campaign management solution to drive maximum ROI and optimize their reach to audiences across the increasingly fragmented, interactive media landscape.
• Media owners/publishers will gain access to best-in-class inventory optimization and monetization solutions across a full suite of rich media, video and targeting capabilities.
• The broader advertising ecosystem will benefit from the leading interactive advertising agency, Avenue A | Razorfish, continuing to serve its impressive client roster, while also embedding the voice of the marketer into Microsoft’s next generation advertising solutions and services. 

Founded in 1997, aQuantive, Inc.  is the parent company of one of the industry’s most successful families of digital marketing service and technology companies, encompassing the three primary brands Atlas, DRIVEpm and Avenue A | Razorfish.

The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of Microsoft’s fiscal year 2008. The acquisition is not expected to have a significant impact on the financial guidance previously issued by the Company.

aQuantive, which has approximately 2600 employees, will continue to operate from its Seattle headquarters as part of Microsoft’s Online Services Business. The combination of Microsoft and aQuantive takes the Company’s advertising platform to the next level in its ability to serve Microsoft’s first party audience assets like MSN, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and Office Live, as well as for third party publishers and applications such as Facebook and Activision game titles.

May 18th, 2007

No Microsoft / Yahoo! Merger

According to MarketWatch, the talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! over a possible combination are no longer active, according to a media report late Friday. The Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site that in recent months the two companies discussed a possible merger, but that the discussions are no longer active. The two companies may still explore other ways of cooperating, the Journal reported.

May 7th, 2007