The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft

19.9 The Big Boys: eBay And Microsoft

One of the great things about contextualized advertising is that outside of Google and Yahoo!, the best competitors are all start-ups. Or should that be up-starts?

A couple of big boys though have begun to muscle in on the market.

Fig. 19.7 eBay’s ad selections.

eBay now has its own contextualized affiliate system. The system scans publishers’ Web pages, identifies keywords and serves related ads drawn from its online auctions. Publishers receive between 40 and 70 percent of eBay’s commission on the sale.

Unlike ContextCash though, these ads aren’t embedded into text. They appear in units, like AdSense ads. And like AdSense ads, you’re free to change the color scheme and ad size, and place the code wherever you want.

But they’re always going to look like ads. When the most eyecatching part of the ad is the price, there’s no hiding the fact that any user who clicks is heading to a sales page and not to a site that will give him information.

And because the ads will change with the auctions, unless you’re writing specifically about a product that someone is always selling at eBay, you’d probably do better promoting new goods with an Amazon affiliate ad.

That’s especially true as long as eBay make it difficult for people to join the program. The system is currently only available to eBay’s affiliates. But you can become an affiliate at www.affiliates.ebay.com and check out the ad program at http://affiliates.ebay.com/ads/adcontext/index.html.

The other big company stepping into the filed is Microsoft. They’d been talking about rolling out a contextualized ad system for a long time but only really got going in 2006.

They’re still far behind.

There’s nowhere for publishers to sign up at the moment (it’s invitation only), the ads are only running on MSN’s own network and the inventory looks pretty limited.

Although we know that the system is going to use demographic and geo-targeting to keep the ads close to users, that advertisers can choose keywords and will pay per click, we know nothing about how the contextualization system is actually going to work. Some of the results turning up on some of MSN’s sites are way off.

What we do know though is that the ad units are going to look a lot like AdSense units.

Fig. 19.8 A contextualized ad unit at
the bottom of money central.msn .com

If Microsoft can build up advertisers and iron out the bugs, they could be a good alternative to Google and YPN. Until then though, it’s still AdSense plus text links and affiliate ads.