MSN and Ask Jeeves cooking up advertising opportunities

Last month (August 2005), Ask Jeeves and MSN (2 major search engines) have made announcements which further expand the paid search advertising opportunities for web marketers.

Ask Jeeves has begun selling sponsored/pay per click listings on its network of sites which include Ask.com, Excite.com, iWon.com, and MyWay.com. These text based advertisements will work in a similar fashion to their current Google based sponsored links. It does appear however that as Ask has a contract with Google to display Google's sponsored listings through 2007, Ask will retain Google's contract by serving up both Google and Ask sponsored links. In a search, Ask related paid advertisements will appear above Google's advertisements. According to USA Today, "Google accounted for roughly 70% of Ask Jeeves' revenue of $261 million last year." So, this could be an excellent revenue source for Ask if their advertising revenue stays on track as Ask will obviously take a bigger share of the revenue generated.
More on Ask Jeeves Sponsored Listings.

Having stirred the advertising pot a few months ago by announcing the beta release of an MSN paid search service, MSN has announced further testing of their paid search service come October. While surfing MSN at that time, you should encounter varying use of MSN or Yahoo generated ads as MSN tests the two sources in different searches. During this pre-holiday shopping frenzy, only select sites that have applied to take part in MSN's beta advertising program will get to see just how well MSN's keyword program might function. If you can't wait however, you can take part in their 'Featured Sites' program which currently lists featured sites above the Yahoo sponsored ads.

Click here for more info on MSN Paid Search Solution