Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL ink advertising tie-up

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 9 Nov 2011 at 08:28

A triumvirate of internet giants – Yahoo Microsoft and AOL – have joined forces in an advertising pact aimed at making the companies more competitive with Google.

The trio has announced agreements that “should dramatically improve the process of buying and selling premium online display inventory”.

According to the companies, the deal, which will initially focus on the US, will allow them to sell each other’s online display inventory to their respective advertising customers.

We're not reducing competition in any way, shape or form. As a result of transparency, the competition is only going to increase

“Enhancing choice and scale in today’s display advertising market is ‘a rising tide that lifts all boats’,” said Rik van der Kooi, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Advertising Business Group. “This partnership will create an opportunity where advertisers and publishers alike can benefit from easier access to — and demand for — high-quality inventory. The fact that we’re joining together to offer this kind of access to quality — yet each with our own differentiated ad offerings — is something that will benefit the market as a whole.”

The alliance of three such big name inevitably raised questions over what the deal would mean for competition, but Microsoft played down the impact and said the alliance was open to other networks if they wished to join.

"We're not reducing competition in any way, shape or form," said van der Kooi, in a conference covered by the Reuters news agency. "As a result of transparency, the competition is only going to increase. [We] don't expect any issues on that side."

System integration

The companies said the main benefits of the deal could be to enable advertisers to buy space on a larger scale, and allow the ad networks to sell more of their inventory.

The deal relies on Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo integrating the way spare space is sold. “By integrating one another’s real-time bidding technologies to facilitate the availability of non-reserved inventory by early 2012, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL expect to have the opportunity to access each other’s non-reserved inventory to achieve the benefits of scale and efficiency,” the companies said in a statement.