Microsoft's Browser Ad Campaign (at its finest)
The image below is a screen shot that I took while downloading Firefox 3 Portable beta 5 from (Cnet) download.com.
I'm not exactly sure what to think about the sponsored listing. I find it humorous that Microsoft would be advertising their browser on a post download page for a different browser. Who exactly are they targeting anyway? People who use a product like Firefox 3 Portable beta 5 are already hard core Firefox fans and users so I don't see too many people deleting what they just downloaded to get IE7 instead. It just isn't happening.
It just goes to show the amount of funds that Microsoft has to piss away that they can afford to advertise even in the least effective areas. Can you imagine the amount of money that they must put out to show up next to or on the same page as the keyword Firefox?
Out of curiosity, I checked a few more pages on download.com and both of the post download pages for Firefox 3 beta 5 and Firefox 2.0.0.13 have IE 7 ads on them.
But wait, there's more.
In that sponsored listing section there is an about link as in "about the sponsored listing".
The following image shows what you see when you click on that about link.
Thanks for reading
Ken
IMO
It's a paid services from keywords for example "browsers" or "downloads"
you can do this will google adsense and many others.
I wish we would do more on it for mozilla properties, Firefox, thunderbird and even spreadfirefox most of the search engine submissions desperately needs updating. google spreadfirefox on the first fold you see only 1 Results 1 - 10 of about 572,000 for spreadfirefox for a few dollars this is not acceptable IMO.
its no different them me viewing article about mozilla and seeing the annoying download flock banner I am glad thats not my work ;)
I could redo them in less then five minutes
I don't think they would get to many click's
Jamey Boje
SFx Administrator mozilla daily news
Mozilla and paid search
Thanks for sharing this. Definitely from Google Ad Sense -- Microsoft is clearly bidding on browser related terms.
Mozilla actually does quite a bit of search engine marketing on terms like "firefox" and "mozilla" and more generic terms like "browser". Check out Ken's blog of metrics (http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/) or my blog (http://giantspatula.com) to read about some of the efforts that we are doing to optimize our paid search program.