Microsoft's AdCenter

Microsoft has launched adCenter where advertisers can place their ads at targeted sites.A new release of adCenter is expected in the next 2 months, with many of the new features resulting from testing and customer feedback collected through adLabs.

Silient features of adCenter are

• Advertisers can see when the clicks (on their Ads) lead to sales.
• Ads can be targeted to places and constumers of the advertisers' choice.
• Built in tool to get keywords.
• Detail reports of Ads to the advertisers.
• Chose your own price for your Ads.
• Pay only when the Ads are clicked.(the last two are same as any other advertising service)

Keyword service platform :
Keyword optimization efforts are built upon the Keyword Service Platform (KSP), a set of services that third-party developers can use through APIs to build Web applications to analyze keywords.
Product manager James Colborn says "We're making it an open network by publishing and sharing the algorithm" "We're excited to see how our partners will build on the KSP."
This feature gives adCenter a clear competitive advantage over Google and Yahoo.

Microsoft also previewed video hyperlink technology, which will allow marketers to create ad links on products shown in videos. The company said it will make that technology available on MSN starting in the spring.

Colborn also said "For now, Microsoft is testing the feature on Microsoft's network of sites, but the company plans to extend it to other publishers"

While Microsoft has an advantage over its competitors through KSP,MSN is suffering from low search engine popularity and search engine users.This poses a great threat to adCenter because search engine indexing plays very important role in targeting traffic to its Ads.This is one of the main reasons for the success of Google.
comScore reported that MSN garnered just 10.5% of search traffic, compared to Google's 47.3% and Yahoo's 28.5%. This clearly shows that MSN is lagging behind in the race and will have to take lot of pains inorder to compete with Google and Yahoo.