MSN will have its own sponsored search in six months

MSN currently uses sponsored links through the Yahoo system. Not for much longer. MSN paid search is coming by summer per the Search Engine Guide.

Microsoft announced yesterday that they would be replacing Yahoo!’s paid search advertisements with ads managed through MSN’s new adCenter sometime in the next six months. adCenter is currently being beta tested by about 2,000 U.S. advertisers and is expected to go into wide launch early this summer.

An interesting feature of MSN’s paid search, as reported by our Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is one that allows viewers to click on cars, clothing or other products that appear in online movies or TV shows. For example, viewers of ‘Sex and the City’ could click on Carrie Bradshaw’s designer shoes or Kamali sweaters as she walks down a New York street and immediately be transported to advertisements for those products.

I’m not sure that any of this matters much for law firms and professional services firms. In December, I had 3226 click-throughs from a Google search and 229 from MSN. The business traffic from MSN is just not there and I hear no buzz on the net about getting search engine performance on MSN.