Google has sured up it's partnership with a big Australian publisher as
Microsoft looks to encroach into the contextual ad game with a tie up
with open source ad serving software provider OpenX.
Google has announced the
renewal of their AdSense partnership
with leading Australian publisher News Digital Media providing
contextual text advertising against content and searches. Google claims to have paid over $US5b to publishers in the past
year from AdSense advertising.
For many blog and website
owners, Google AdSense is one of the the only feasible options for monetisation. With easy set up
and a set-and-forget setup Google AdSense has almost become ubiquitous across the web.
Whilst
it seems that (almost) everyone online relies on Google AdSense in some
way, it is something that doesn't sit well with many publishers who
rely on the revenue from Google have noticed that their revenues have declined leaving many looking for new answers.
Microsoft, armed with a freshly minted Bing, is looking to take advantage with the growing disillusionment,
announcing a multi year partnership with
OpenX that will see the companies to “cross-market and promote products” to their respective publishers.
The free OpenX
will become a preferred partner
to publishers for enterprise ad serving solutions and in return has
agreed to
promote Microsoft’s Content Ads to its own customers. Whilst it may
seem a little incongruous for Microsoft to promote a product that
directly compete with it's own Atlas software.
However
unlike OpenX, Microsoft's Atlas and Google's DoubleClick software are
not free, and not particularly rock solid. OpenX claims to have over
150,000 publishers generating in the range of 300 billion ad
impressions a month with publishers able to serve their own advertising
or 'flick the switch' to let OpenX sell ad space for them. In the
future this will likely mean running Microsoft Content Ads or any other
similar Microsoft product.
Crucially for the contextual ad
market, publishers that use OpenX are often smaller entrepreneurial
sites which are run on the smell of an oily rag. Laying out extra cash
for ad-serving software is simply out of the question. It is this very
same market that has generated billions in contextual ad revenue for
Google and yet another stone cast as Microsoft desperately tries to
battle the might of Mountain View online.
