Microsoft Aims For "Top Two" in Web Advertising

[engine]

Microsoft Corp. aims to be one of the top two players in the online advertising market in three to five years, a company executive in charge of the business said on Thursday.

Speaking at a UBS investor conference, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division, laid out the company's strategy to become a leader in the growing online advertising industry with a "10, 20, 30, 40" plan.

The plan, which represents Microsoft's aspirations over the next three to five years, calls on Microsoft to increase the company's share in Web search, page views, percentage of time on the Internet and percentage of advertising dollars.

Microsoft Aims For "Top Two" in Web Advertising [uk.reuters.com]

[XtendScott]

You have to have a goal!

Not sure what it takes to be #2 in online advertising, but its a big step from that to the #1 position.

[marketingmagic]

Talk is cheap. :-)

[Sharpseo]

Even striving to surpass YSM is a stretch at this point. They're making minor improvements in Adcenter, but some of their recent changes could be viewed as downgrades.

Maybe they plan to conquer the online advertising world by buying their way into ad agreements, a la Facebook.

[designhaus]

They should really try to walk before they run. MSN Ad Centre is a joke! Come on MSN with all the money in the world lets see some progress.

[vbPoetess]

So, they have not yet left thinking about it.

[ogletree]

MS has never been into quality. Google will always stay on top as long as they stick to producing high quality products.

One proof is in that they have .NET which is the most SEO unfriendly website creation software out there. How do they expect to index the web if they encourage people to make stuff that is so ugly. Or maybe this is a tactic. Maybe hidden in all that bloat is secret code that lets them index it better than other search engines.

[lexipixel]

To be #2 in online advertising, they'd have to be #2 in search.

A two-word strategy is the only way it could be done:

>>>> Buy Yahoo

[Sharpseo]

>>>> Buy Yahoo

Agreed, but Yahoo looks way overpriced here. Microsoft would have to pay a premium from current levels too. Hard to justify it. They're betting on their own efforts.

Kinda off topic, but I don't get Yahoo's current valuation. Their P/E is currently higher than Google's, but they lack growth. People seem to be valuing them based on the fact that they're not living up to their potential.

Their stake in Alibaba.com is propping their price up a bit, but I've heard it's only worth ~$2/share.

[dakuma]

Ogletree: ".NET which is the most SEO unfriendly website creation software out there"

.net is a group of technoligies that provides a "better glue" for Object Oriented Programming. It's not "Website creation software" perhaps you were thinking about ASP.net? I'm still a fairly new developer (just under 3 years experience) but I've seen first hand the improvements from VS2003 to VS2005 and now VS2008. Despite making mistakes (many of them) Microsoft does understand programming and has made my life as a developer more enjoyable.

That said, I don't believe Microsoft understands the web and web advertising like Google does.

[edited by: encyclo at 12:39 am (utc) on Nov. 18, 2007]

[rubenski]

Should we expect something similar to Adsense from Microsoft?

[vincevincevince]

Fits with the buy-buy-buy strategy. Become number two in web advertising by buying up big-traffic sites and putting your ads there.

[PowerUp]

There is a strategy to be number 2 fairly quickly. But they have to get their ad delivery systems right first.