Office Live is increasing the reach of small businesses everywhere with the addition of Ask Sponsored Listings, part of the IAC Advertising Network. This is a huge deal for Office Live, which has had a bumpy past, and adManager, which is still in beta. Now not only would adManager customers reach their advertisements through MSN and Windows Live properties, but also Ask.com, with a myriad of wholly-owned search sites (mywebsearch.com, mysearch.com), proprietary content sites (myway.com, iwon.com, excite.com), and 90+ syndicated network partnerships like Evite, CNET, Citysearch, and Infospace to name a few. IAC boasts Ask Sponsored Listings on their web site.
Benefits
- Tap into the 3rd largest search network
- Access to campaign optimization experts
- Boost clicks without impacting CPA metrics
Audience & Usage (based upon comScore MediaMetrix January 2007)
- 61.4 million monthly unique users
- 35% Reach
- 11.5% Share of Searches
This means that Google's AdSense is by no means the only fish in the sea, and Microsoft is extremely interested in capturing a large portion of the small business market to build it's search-based revenue. This is the first time in 5 years that 2 of the largest search engines have teamed up, and amazingly enough Microsoft didn't purchase a company to do it. Based upon the latest figures from comScore, this means the two combined will reach 18.2% of the search audience, over 1.5 billion search queries per month. I wonder if Microsoft is pursuing any other search engines, after all they already have a partnership with Yahoo! and their messenger service.
Microsoft is offering a $50 bonus for companies that sign-up for the service, after a $5 processing fee, and now until the end of the month, there is also a $10,000 sweepstakes. Sweepstakes seem to work well for Microsoft, just take a look at Live Search Club.
@Matthew