Microsoft To Offer Ads On MSN Mobile

The display ads will consist of banner and text placements that will appear on the MSN Mobile home page and its channels, including sports, news, entertainment, weather and money.

Paramount Pictures and Jaguar Cars North America have signed on to advertise on MSN Mobile. Microsoft currently sells mobile phone advertisements in Belgium, France, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Competitors such as Yahoo, AOL and Google already offer display advertising on their own mobile sites. "For mobile services we have been very focused on delivering a great customer experience and wanted to wait until we felt that our services were ready," a Microsoft spokesperson said in reference tot the advertising on MSN Mobile.

In May Microsoft purchased ScreenTonic, a European mobile advertising company, whose technology is helping to run the new mobile advertising system. The new mobile ad initiative by Microsoft is driven in part by its purchase of digital advertising firm aQuantive for $6 billion.

Opus Research predicts that mobile advertising in Europe and North America will be more than $5 billion in 2012, up from around $107 million at the close of 2007. The biggest share of mobile advertising has been from media companies promoting Web sites, TV shows, movies and books according to M: Metrics.

MSN Mobile will also offer the ability to buy movie tickets from MovieTickets.com, along with ring tones, and wallpaper. The mobile service will also offer an astrology channel.

MSN Mobile provides users with access to e-mail, news, sports, entertainment, local movie listings, maps, directions and Windows Live services.

Highlights of MSN Mobile include:

Easy navigation and access. To enable mobile customers to quickly and easily access their favorite Windows Live services and Web content, MSNMobile has been designed for one-stop access with easy navigation, quick links and shortcuts.

Optimized rendering. Many Web pages don’t display well on mobile phones and are hard to navigate, but MSN Mobile is designed to deliver a high- quality experience on mobile phones.

"We believe consumers want to see their favorite Web sites optimized for their mobile phones, while having them remain easily accessible and free of charge," said John Smelzer, senior vice president and general manager of mobile for Fox Interactive Media.

"FOXSports.com is an integral part of MSN.com, so extending that experience to the mobile Web makes perfect sense. We look forward to working with MSN and the carriers to usher in the next wave of mobile content."