Briefs

ClickZ, Kevin Lee | August 25, 2006

Search engines are fighting ad networks in a battle for eyeballs. Both need eyeballs to show highly targeted advertising to. This competitive environment puts the search engines in direct competition with advertising networks that don't have a search engine component in their offerings. When serving ads, more data is better. That's been the driver of some recent announcements.

MSN announced this week it will sell and provide both banner ads and sponsored links on Facebook. MSN will use adCenter, its online advertising platform, along with other in-house technology and services. To me, that means much of the inventory will be available on the same platform advertisers use all the time to manage search within MSN. Clearly, Microsoft understands to compete, it needs both scale and data.

Google's MySpace deal and MSN's Facebook deal are clearly only the beginning of the search engine inventory war. The additional layer to these two deals, which isn't being talked about much, is the value of data collected during the ad display process.

Both individual (non-personally identifiable individual data) and macro-level data on responsiveness and interest can be gathered while serving ads. Facebook (more so than MySpace) has a ton of information due to its hierarchy of interests, groups, and demographics; geographic info; and the way profiles are networked. This information allows for both contextual and behavioral ad serving. The more information an ad server has about a person, the better targeted the advertising.

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