As an Internet advertising guru I was pleased to get this email from Microsoft yesterday…

We’re excited to announce the release of the Microsoft Content Ads Beta to all U.S. adCenter advertisers on August 29! With this release, you can extend your advertising reach beyond search, and choose how your accounts are upgraded.

On August 29, you don’t have to make any changes and your ad groups will automatically expand to hybrid distribution, meaning they will distribute to search and content pages.

Where Content Ads appear:

Ad groups expanded for contextual distribution will display on
relevant webpages on the quality Microsoft network, including
MSN Tech & Gadgets, Money, Real Estate, and Windows
Marketplace, as well as partner websites.

What’s this mean? Well Micrsoft is jumping into the contextual advertising game… finally. Note: Many people and bloggers confuse the terms AdWords and AdSense. AdWords is an advertising platform by Google where Advertisers can purchase ads to be displayed in AdSesnse and as sponsored search results in Google. AdSense allows Publishers to place contextually relevant material on their own website in order to make money.

Microsoft does not provide an equivalent to the AdSense model.

This is a good thing for us traffic arbitrageurs out there (more on this later).

Tags: Microsoft, Advertising, AdCenter, AdWords, AdSense