“Display your product or service to as many as 78 million potential customers”

When you visit the Microsoft Adcenter website, this is the caption that would greet you. Microsoft has come a long way in its competition with Google’s Adwords and has a niche market of its own. The ads hosted by Microsoft Adcenter are featured on Microsoft’s search engine Bing. After Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft has come up with a successful system to feature PPC (Pay per click)  ads. Until 2006, Microsoft would show these ads on the MSN search site. It also had a collaboration with Yahoo! and hosted their ads as well, until recently when the contract expiry prompted Microsoft to handle its own full fledged advertising.

The Web service API and the UI, both of which are provided by Microsoft for management of ads on their affiliate websites are built on the Microsoft .Net 2.0 framework.  The cost of the ads are determined in a manner similar to that of the Google Adwords. The highest price for Pay per Click (PPC) is determined by the advertiser. The importance of the ad, that is the position in which it will be displayed on every web-page is determined the popularity of the link which is determined through the advertisement’s CTR (Click through Rate).

The merging of Yahoo search with Microsoft’s Bing brought about a new revolution in the market of paid platform for search engines. Before Bing, the market was invariably divided between Google and Yahoo Search. The leftovers were pointed towards MSN search and other Microsoft search platforms.  The search results will be the same for both the Yahoo search website as well as for Bing, but the advertising platform will be managed by Microsoft’s Adcenter. This is big news for Microsoft and bad news for Google as the merged strength of Microsoft and Yahoo would provide stiff competition. The competition will thus break Google’s monopoly and serve as a check for both the companies who will be competing each moment to improve their services.

Microsoft has come a long way in the field of search engines and using ads in their newly formed Bing. It still remains to be seen if they can continue with their competition with the search giant, Google. Better interfaces, easier to use tools and exclusive offers could go a long way in popularizing Adcenter and Bing. But till then, Adcenter still remains a secondary option to Adwords.