Microsoft adCenter Wins Wall Street Journal Deal
Posted: February 7th, 2008
The Wall Street Journal Digital Network (WSJDN) has delegated Microsoft adCenter with the responsibility of delivering advertisements to its network. This partnership is beneficial to Microsoft in many ways and sheds some light as to where adCenter could be headed in the years to come.
The WSJDN comprises of some notable Internet properties including Barrons.com, MarketWatch.com, and of course the Wall Street Journal homepage WSJ.com. They draw in over 20 million unique visitors each month with over 330 million pageviews, but it’s really the demographic of these visitors that’s the goldmine.
As the premier network in the Business / Finance / Stocks verticals, the WSJDN attracts a large audience of active investors, decision-makers, executives, and other such affluent representatives. Any advertiser looking to reach this demographic through the WSJDN will now necessarily be an adCenter advertiser, with Microsoft collecting a nice little fee. And with the financial verticals being so pricy, Microsoft is likely to further capitalize on the advertisers’ spending.
So even with only a small fraction of search traffic under its belt (around 10% depending on who you ask), Microsoft’s adCenter division is still able to stay profitable through exclusivity deals like this one.
Well this will be a pretty good deal for Microsoft…this is a huge market sector to get exclusive dibs on. Will be interesting to see how much profit they actually make from this, and if they use it to put towards getting the one up on google (though I think that’ll take quite a while)
It is good to see that someone other Google is making some serious inroads with their advertising programs.
Competition is always good.
@Daniel:
I’m also curious about the actual profit numbers from this venture. Exclusivity contracts usually involve some sort of incentive (usually monetary). Although Microsoft probably had to pay WSJDN for the exclusive rights, there most likely were quotas that need to be met by WSJDN too that help ensure that Microsoft is breaking even.
@Jylan:
Indeed, open competition is good - especially on the Internet.
Perhaps this will help a little to offset their failed Yahoo takeover/deal.
It might help to offset the failed takeover in terms of overall revenue, but the nature of the deal and this partnership are different and reach different markets.
The takeover has failed? What news are you guys reading? Last I heard, Microsoft was in the process of ousting the current board
The initial bid of $44.6 billion was rejected. Microsoft might be looking into offering a bit more behind closed doors, but as it stands right now there is no takeover.