14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft will soon get more money from online ads. It is currently in talks to join with America Online. Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Steven A. Ballmer told a Washington area gathering yesterday that "Online advertising is of keen interest to us (Microsoft)? If you ask particularly for our consumer-facing businesses, what will be the most rapidly growing revenue stream at Microsoft, it's absolutely going to be advertising. So we're very focused on what it means to do a better job in display advertising, what it means to do a better job in paid listings and sponsored search advertising."
"We have today a business that's closing in on $2 billion of ad revenue," Ballmer said, adding that this was about 15 percent of total estimated online ad spending. "We are smaller than Google and Yahoo, but we are the number-three player in the online ad market, and that's a lot of money. You know, anything north of a billion dollars certainly registers with me... But of course, we're a $40 billion company, so it's a much smaller percentage of our revenue than it is some other guys in the business."
Ballmer wants to get Microsoft in on a market that could bring even more money for the software giant. This news seems to profit AOL who has been providing Google's service to their customers for quite some time now. AOL takes 80 cents for every ad dollar Google brings generated on the AOL service (this adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars). It's no wonder why Microsoft wants a bigger piece of the cake.