Microsoft Expands Officially Their Affiliate Activities to Promote MS AdCenter

Linda at 5 Star Affiliate Programs just released the news about Microsoft’s new adCenter Affiliate Program. See her blog post here and the official press release here.

This does not come as a surprise to me, since Microsoft was “lurking” around the affiliate marketing space for a while already. There was the news in May this year about their “affiliate network” launch (MicrosoftAffiliates.net), which is basically an in-house program based on Kowabunga Technologies tracking and reporting platform (MyAffiliateProgram). It was a bummer for me, when Microsoft only launched a campaign for their Microsoft Live OneCare product and not for any of their other services or software products.

See my more detailed post about that launch from May.

They used to run some test campaigns via Commission Junction and their advertising company McCann throughout this year until about September. They paid good commission, very good one as a matter of fact and I am promoting their offer (on and off depending on availability) since early this year. It converts pretty well too and is definitely worthwhile checking out.

I was happy to hear about the news that they launched a new campaign via their in-house solution via a Kowabunga rep a few days ago. The only bummer was that the commission rate for a new account is “only” $30.00 $35.00 (compared to the $90.00 via McCann/CJ).

Okay, the commission is around the same amount that Microsoft’s competition is paying, such as Yahoo!, who pays $25-$50, Enhance (CJ) $25.00, Miva (CJ) $20.00 and goClick (ShareASale) $25.00 and trailing at the end Google with $5.00 via their own AdSense tracking platform.

I hope that they will raise the commission a bit in the future to be a bit more aggressive that their competitors. The higher commission would get Microsoft more exposure and promotion by affiliates and could significantly increase the number of clients in a relative short period of time. I heard somewhere unofficially that MS has a shortage of ad inventory, which would explain why their cut down on their aggressive advertiser acquisition strategy. The deal with Facebook has with almost 100% certainty to some extend to do with this shortage.

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski