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From: "John Beamish" 

I'm not sure why this qualifies as news but it's on Reuters and the WSJ. I
suppose that, for some, the cross-linking between Hotmail and Live Search
(through a cookie? an IP address?) is new but for many others it's yesterday's
news.  Still, I thought I'd post it.


Here's a comment from one site:

http://searchengineland.com/061226-090229.php
How Microsoft's Behavioral Targeting Works

Microsoft Ad Push Is All About You at the Wall Street Journal has a nice
overview of how Microsoft's behavioral targeting ad software works, nothing
ground breaking, but a nice overview. I'll quote a piece of the article for
you:

Here's how it works: If someone types in "compare car prices" on
Live Search,
Microsoft's computers note that the person is probably considering buying a
vehicle. The computers then check with the list of Hotmail accounts to see if
they have any information on the person. If they do, and an auto maker has paid
Microsoft to target this type of person, the computer will automatically send a
car ad when she next looks at a Microsoft Web page. As a result, people should
see more ads that are of interest to them. "We know what Web sites they have
visited and what key words they used," says Mr. Dobson. "We can deduce what
their interests are." Microsoft says that in testing in the U.S., behavioral
targeting increased clicks on ads by as much as 76%.

The rest of the article discusses the competitive landscape.



And here's the piece on Reuters.

http://in.today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=technologyNews&storyID=2
006-12-26T110332Z_01_NOOTR_RTRJONC_0_India-281442-1.xml

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. is making a global push to sell targeted
online advertisements using data gathered from users of its Hotmail email
service, the Wall Street Journal reported on its Web site on Tuesday.

Microsoft, the world's largest software maker, is aiming to grab a bigger slice
of the online advertising market for its msn.com news page and other
Microsoft-owned sites. It currently lags behind Google and Yahoo.

The company has begun combining personal data from the 263 million users of its
free Hotmail email service with information gained from monitoring their
searches, the paper said.

For advertisers, combining these two sets of information could allow them to
better target the ads they send to people's computers, and avoid wasting
people's time with irrelevant ads, the paper cited Chris Dobson, Microsoft's
global head of advertising sales, as saying.

Microsoft is using the information to sell ad space on Microsoft Web pages,
including msn.com and Hotmail, the paper said.

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