Microsoft News Tracker

Dare Obasanjo points to the new adCenter blog where we find out that an updated version of the limited beta is near release. Oilman reports on a demo of the new version and has screenshots. It still looks like Microsoft is on track for a full launch of adCenter in June 2006

Meanwhile, on the contextual Internet advertising front, Nathan Weinberg points out a post at Jensense where Jennifer Slegg reveals what she found while reading the session descriptions for the upcoming Microsoft Mix06 conference where she is to be a speaker:

MSN ContentAds is their contextual advertising program name and a launch date will be sometime in 2006.
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While it is extremely likely ContentAds will only be in beta for a soft launch in 2006, similar to AdCenter starting off with a small beta, the fact that MSN is planning their program to launch relatively soon in the contextual advertising timeline is very good news to hear. With YPN taking over two years to launch after the introduction of Google AdSense, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see MSN not offer their own contextual program until 2007 or 2008.

The greater the delay, the bigger Google’s lead gets.