TinkyWinky - 9:53 pm on Nov 23, 2009 (gmt 0)

"very few products that can be sold in context to the news"..."It's that news is not good for presenting ads."

I assume you are qualifying that as clickthrough ads - ie. MS Adcenter as I would have to disagree on that as a general statement.

If M$ have a way to use Y! display ads in the future deal, then brand awareness and product association-wise it's big stuff... not a G buster, but a good solid income stream which is not OS related....

Targetted ads displaying next to news content can work - provided it is only about associating a brand to the broad topic or the focus of the news story.

It would need a very good ad inventory as well as good contextual matching of ads to stories - maybe therein lies the problem?