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Microsoft's adCenter Opens For Business

Microsoft now lets anyone sign-up for adCenter, the long-awaited, self-serve Internet advertising feature that competes with Google's pioneering AdSense.

To create an adCenter account, you must leave a credit card number. Microsoft then charges that credit card account a non-refundable $5. From there, adCenter is very similar to Google's AdSense.

Each lets someone bid against other in order to have their advertisement accompany search results for a particular search term. Each time someone clicks on the ad, Google, Microsoft et al gets paid the amount of the winning bid.

But Microsoft thinks it has a big edge. The company claims that no other search advertising program steers ads to customers based on day of the week and time of day, a specific geographic location.

AdSense, and Yahoo's self-serve ad feature can't target an audience that precisely. In theory, the more refined the audience choice, the more successful the marketing.

adCenter makes Microsoft a "solid number three player," Directions On Microsoft analyst Matt Rosoff said during an interview in late December, when adCenter first appeared on the scene in Singapore and France.

That could mean more of the spending on search advertising will go Microsoft's way. And that could mean significant new revenues. In the United States alone, $5.1 billion was spent on this kind of advertising in 2005, various analysts suggest.

AdCenter also represents the latest in hostilities between Google and Microsoft, which Google identifies as its chief competitor, according to Google financial filings.

Microsoft feels the same way about Google. The Redmond software giant, and operator of the number three search engine, intends to spend $2 billion more than expected mostly on MSN, its Internet portal and search engine, and Windows Live, a next generation version of many of its existing features like Hotmail e-mail. Both features compete directly with Google.

"We will keep them (meaning Google) honest," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said during a May 3 address to the annual MSN Strategic Account Alliance in Redmond, Wash. adCenter is also one of a number of new, Internet-based features that Microsoft is expected to unveil Thursday, the summit's final day.

The general release of adCenter is also a kind of curtain call for Yahoo, which has been providing the same kind of features to Microsoft under terms guided by a profit-sharing arrangement. That agreement ends in June, and at that time it's many an analyst's understanding that Yahoo will disappear from the scene. [eweek.com]

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