Why MSN Should Make Its Move Now

It's true that MSN Search does not get as much search traffic as Google. But right now, the forums are going crazy with complaints about Google's new price and ad quality changes. It appears that Google has no programmatic way to detect the quality of a landing page (that is, the page on which someone lands after clicking on an ad). As a result, Google recently increased prices on some keywords to clean out the ad "spammers." Unfortunately, this affected not only the spammers but also a range of advertisers from mom and pops to some big advertisers. The result is an unhappy Adwords user base. (As an aside, I predict that all those "grey" area spammers were actually pretty important to Google's revenue stream and that earnings will suffer as a result.)

MSN AdCenter, while still smoothing out some rough spots, should make its move. It should do a huge blitz to ad agencies and online advertisers. It should go full force after companies like Adapt, Efficient Frontier, and Atlas to get advertisers to spend spend spend on MSN AdCenter. Yes, MSN search does not receive the kind of search traffic that Google does, but you have to remember that AdCenter's other objective must be to build a large enough market of advertisers to deliver a syndicated ad service (a la Overture and AdSense). Now is the time for AdCenter to get a ton of advertisers onto its platform, which will produce a viable ad marketplace, allowing AdCenter to put out a viable and syndicated ad service.