Why Microsoft Wanted To Buy Claria

Miscellaneous

from the it-all-becomes-as-bit-clearer dept

Remember over the summer when Microsoft “leaked” information about how they might want to buy Claria, most well known for the adware Gator? After many people reacted negatively, Microsoft popped that trial balloon and said they weren’t going to buy the company. Well, with Microsoft’s recent “Live” announcement, where they made it clear that much of the Live offerings will be ad supported, the thinking behind the possible Claria purchase became a lot clearer. There’s an article today talking about how much Microsoft is going to be relying on their new AdCenter ad targeting platform to squeeze more money out of any advertising on the Live systems. The problem is that, right now, AdCenter only does keyword based matching, and Microsoft desperately wants behavioral matching — which is what Claria is now offering (even though that behavioral matching is based on surreptitiously installed software). What this means, of course, is that there’s plenty more to come, and don’t think for a second Microsoft won’t look at other buying opportunities in the behavioral advertising space to figure out some way to make an ad-supported model actually work.