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Microsoft today announced the acquisition of Israeli ad targeting firm, YaData. The company makes and sells analytic software to help Internet marketers segment audiences in greater detail for better ad targeting.
Microsoft today announced an agreement to acquire YaData Ltd., a provider of advanced tools for the discovery of unique customer segments. YaData’s technology will enable Microsoft to provide its advertisers with richer targeting capabilities so they can connect with their audience in more efficient and engaging ways, at the same time providing its customers more relevant and focused ads. The YaData team will join Microsoft’s Israel R&D center in Herzliya and YaData’s solutions will be deployed through Microsoft’s Advertiser and Publisher Solutions group.
The price tag is rumored at $20-30 million. I offer my usual observation that better ad targeting inherently means less user privacy which may some day come home to roost at the hands of government regulators.
Microsoft today announced an agreement with CNBC to be the financial network’s exclusive provider for banner and contextual ads for the fledgling CNBC.com (replacing Google’s would-be acquisition DoubleClick). You may recall that CNBC.com went its own way last year after having been hosted on MSN.
Yesterday was Facebook’s big debut party for their new platform designed to milk some cash from their faithful members via “social” advertising. Any sarcasm on my part would be superfluous after Nicholas Carr’s application of a flamethrower, but one interesting aspect was that Microsoft, who a year ago was working with Facebook “on future technology and advertising initiatives” and recently bought a slice of the company, was relegated to the position of being merely one of 60 initial advertisers on the new platform.
So where does Microsoft fit into Facebook’s overall advertising plans? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explains:
Microsoft today announced a public beta of Project Gatineau, their free Web analytics software that was revealed in January.
Last week SEO guru David Naylor posted some leaked screen shots of Gatineau, the adCenter Web analytics tool we previously mentioned in January. They are pretty much what one would expect for a Google Analytics competitor except for one that has a nice breakout of Web site visitors by gender and the promise of a similar breakout by age, neither of which Google provides.
Given today’s Microsoft positioning on privacy, one can’t help but be curious as to how this demographic data was obtained. Microsoft’s Ian Thomas explains:
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