Microsoft abandons display advertising

Microsoft recently sold its display ads to AOL and replaced Google’s search advertising technology for AOL. Although it has never directly disclosed the performance of its advertising business in financial reports, Microsoft has disclosed enough details in its past financial reports to allow the outside world to have a good understanding of its past performance in advertising. However, in the previous quarter, Microsoft did not disclose any information related to its display advertisements in its financial statements. This may be a precursor to the sale.

The growth momentum of Microsoft's search advertising business has been good. Last quarter's revenue was close to 1 billion US dollars (about 6.1 billion yuan), and may soon reach 1 billion US dollars, especially under the help of the deal with AOL. In contrast, the display advertising business has been declining for some time. In the last two quarters of 2014, the revenue was below 250 million U.S. dollars (about 1.5 billion yuan).

AOL's abandonment of Google's shift to Bing itself has little effect on Google, but if you consider that Firefox had replaced the default search engine with Yahoo in the United States earlier, and that Apple may abandon Google this year, this is really not good news for Google. . One of the challenges that Google currently faces is that it is gradually competing with many of its original partners, of which Apple is the most prominent example. It will begin to pay for this strategy.