From MarketingShift

The time is getting near. You can hear the footsteps. Microsoft is coming. On Monday, Feb 27th they will open the flood gates, almost. Following their recent adCenter update, a notice was sent to current advertisers on the MSN adCenter, MSN said:

"our next step is to begin increasing traffic to your ads served by MSN adCenter. To that end, we will be increasing traffic by approximately 70% from our current levels."

This notice is to serve warning that Microsoft is getting ready to stick its hand in your advertising budget and take their share. MSN currently displays ads from their system 25% of the time and Yahoo ads the other 75%. MSN call this "an increase in traffic" but that is only if click through rates remain at their current levels. This increase will provide us with a lot of good information on the future of adCenter and hopefully answer a lot of questions.

I think it’s about time to run ads in AdCenter.  I’ve been so busy using it as a research tool - I’ve heard the CTR is much better in AdCenter than in Google/Yahoo-Overture.

You can target your markets in the same way you can get Demographic information about search terms in the Keyword Research tool.

I think the Paid Search Market is going to look entirely different a year from now - I believe that Google and Yahoo will move into providing Geo-Demographics and specific location click through data as MSN AdCenter becomes more popular.