Microsoft and AOL have just signed a new 10 year deal that has AOL carrying Bing’s listings and ads. The display space on Microsoft properties will be sold by AOL in all the major markets. This includes mobile and video ads.
Microsoft will keep maintaining Bing and their search ad business.
While AOL will be taking over a larger part of the Microsoft Ads, Microsoft’s Bing Search Engine will be powering AOL’s searches, beginning in January of 2016. AOL search results were powered by Google up until this point. The deal seems fairly similar to the Bing/Yahoo deal.
For marketers, the biggest point of interest is that ads on properties such as MSN, Outlook, X-box and Skype will now be sold through AOL rather than through Microsoft. This is impacting the nine largest markets including the US, UK, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Japan. Other markets will use AppNexus to programmatically sell the display inventory. This part of the deal will begin in the upcoming weeks.
Employees working for Microsoft’s ad sales divisions have been told that nobody will lose their job, though some may be getting job offers from AOL in order to remain employed. Reports vary between 500 and 1200 total jobs being impacted.
While AOL’s search engine being powered by Bing will certainly be a good thing for Bing, it is really not a major bump for the total search market. AOL currently has about 1% of all searches. While this is quite small, every little bit will help Bing. They recently passed 20% of total market share in the US so as they continue to push to hit that ¼ mark this will take them a nice step forward.
Other details of the deal have not yet been released, but from what some people are saying, this is just the beginning of a closer relationship between Microsoft and AOL in the future. Something digital marketers of all stripes will need to keep a close eye on.
