Microsoft invests in advertising technology company Adchemy

By Tom Warren, on 21st Sep 11 12:13 pm with 12 Comments

Microsoft has led a Series E funding round for online ad technology company Adchemy.

The latest funding round sees Adchemy raise $61 million for its growth plans. Microsoft led the funding and will offer Adchemy’s ad technology to Microsoft adCenter customers. Adchemy currently employees 160 full-time employees but plans to recruit between 50 to 80 new staff soon according to Gigaom. The latest round of funding brings a total amount of $116 million in investment from various venture capital sources.

Adchemy provides a unique way to enables advertisers to target consumers. The company has developed an algorithm that allows advertisers to optimize adverts based on what a user inputs into a search box. Adchemy’s technology analyzes the specific search query to work out what a consumers intent is. TechCrunch explains that the technology lets advertisers know whether a search engine user is likely to consider a business class flight when searching for flight tickets. The measurement of intent allows advertisers to then place high-targeted ads on search results and improve click-through rates.

Microsoft’s interest in the technology means the company can offer more relevant adverts on its Bing and Yahoo search results. Microsoft and Yahoo have previously committed to focusing on improving the profitability of paid search campaigns. Microsoft outlined the importance of its expanded partnership with Adchemy in a blog post on Wednesday. “It’s clear evidence that we mean what we say when we talk about pursuing innovation in the search and display landscape,” said Microsoft Advertising chief Rik van der Kooi. “Our expanded partnership with Adchemy will complement our current services and tools and simplify paid search for Microsoft adCenter customers by helping them manage hundreds of intents rather than of millions of keywords.”

  • Seth_p

    Yay…?

  • Jinge

    It would be nice to see real competitors/alternatives to google in the ads domain.
    And lowering the Google income, which is based more than 95% on ads would also be a good thing for them and everybody, they would start to think about earning money with their products, not only spending and buying or destroying competition on every web-based technology.

    • Test1ngi23

      Maybe their competitors should compete harder. If a mega-corp like Google can do free, why can’t other mega-corps do the same?

    • Guest

      It is NOT nor ever will be free in any sense of the word. You pay with lock-in, you pay with your personal information that you can’t ever remove (having an account makes no difference) and extra bandwidth normally not used etc..

      By the way, if you hold proprietary operating systems up to the standard that their source code must be available and/or redistributable as a modified version, why not hold up Google to the same standard with their web services?

      You don’t get it, Google with their services have taken away the leverage Linux needs to gain marketshare.
      The greatest trick Google “pulled was making you think he was you.”

    • Test1ngi23

      “By the way, if you hold proprietary operating systems up to the standard
      that their source code must be available and/or redistributable as a
      modified version, why not hold up Google to the same standard with their
      web services?”

      I agree. That would be nice. But then again, it’s not code that they are publicly distributing.

      “You don’t get it, Google with their services have taken away the leverage Linux needs to gain marketshare. The greatest trick Google “pulled was making you think he was you.”"

      ?? Please elaborate.

    • Jinge

      As Guest says, it is not free for everybody! You search for “free”, but you take ads, and give info about yourself. It works for google, because they have the biggest market-share, but for a new one, trying to compete with 20years of web-indexing is impossible, the amount of data implies huge investments, plus making a better algorithm, plus convincing advertizers plus convincing lambda-users is almost impossible! Even MS with $9 billions has troubles to compete with google. Google has almost “unlimited funds”, and more than 80% worldwide-users  
      (except china) who are using google because it is google and won’t even think about changing , that is the main problem for competition, which cannot raise enough money.

      MS may succeed.in few years to reach gg level, but it is still going to cost a lot of money!

      And google don’t do free, they only give for free what is not their main business (killing at the same time commercial competition!)

    • Guest

      Free? You seem to be confused about what the product is and who the customers are. You’re dumb enough to think the customer is you and the product is Chrome, or Gmail. or Android, etc which you’re getting for free. In fact the product is your personal information which you’re giving up for free so that Google can sell it dearly to their customers, advertisers, who can then target and spam you to death.

  • Anonymous

    msft not buying double click was a mistake that nearly cost them the company.

    • thetruth

      DoubleClick(dot)net (I block them in the hosts file) had shady practises, and Google loved acquiring them, then they can hide other bad deeds so an investigation into the whole online ad industry would not be invoked and Google can continue abusing the system.

      Evil. They suit eachother.

    • Guest

      They tried. Doubleclick preferred being part of Google.

  • Guest

    “Microsoft invests in advertising technology”

    Here I thought MS was finally investing in some decent marketing capability that might be capable of promoting say WP7. But alas… 

  • http://www.futures-explained.com trading futures

    No doubt that Microsoft is globally competitive and investing in an advertising technology is another marketing strategy that could help to target more consumers for Microsoft regarding their products.