In the category of Contextual Search, Google’s AdSense was the first to offer publishers a revenue sharing incentive for running network ads on their high-traffic, subject-relevant sites. Then came the Yahoo! Publishing Network (or YPN for short) still in its beta phase.
Now there’s ContentAds from MSN. Starting on “primarily” MSN owned sites, Microsoft says that ContentAds will place advertisements using not just keywords but also demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools on contextually-relevant affinity sites.
More network competition should mean higher revenue cuts for publishers and more innovation in the way ads are served. That’s the theory anyway, though Microsoft’s late and safe entry into the game leaves open the question of how much innovation will come and how soon.
In other hot releases from across the Redmond campus, Windows Live QnA is now a public beta, meaning you can test it out yourself. Question and Answer search engines are the latest social search phenomenon. Yahoo has Yahoo Answers and Google has Google Answers, both on the Web for a while. If you have a question to pose, a free-form “tagging” system allows you to attach your own keywords and phrases to make it more discoverable by other users.
If you’d like to answer questions, your volunteerism is rewarded with a score that gradually increases increases and reputation stars for consistently giving great answers.
Other features? There’s the ability to request Email notification that someone has answered your question, or be notified via MSN Alerts when others have voted on a best answer. You can also subscribe to a customer, question or site search via RSS.
Tip: Use the QnA search box to find questions on topics that interest you. Questions vanish from the home page in an instant, and the best ones for you to show your expertise may be buried quickly.
Finally, Microsoft has also added behavioral targeting features to its adCenter product. Internet surfers are broken down into 18 audience segments including; mobile users, Internet power users, gamers, movie watchers, new/expecting moms, parents, and several categories encompassing travel searchers, and auto buyers and researchers. The new features are a clear differentiator for Microsoft compared to Google’s AdWords product and Yahoo’s Search Marketing product. Those PPC engines currently do not have integrated behavioral targeting capabilities.
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