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Microsoft Explores Ad Business

Is Microsoft finally ready to a launch its long-delayed advertising exchange? Just barely. The company is set to roll out AdECN, the "real-time" ad exchange it bought in 2007, within the next two weeks. Microsoft is moving slowly; it will open up AdECN to a handful of ad buyers, but only allow them to purchase a "select, limited amount of Microsoft inventory."

Which means that even as Google's AdX exchange, relaunched last fall, continues to gather momentum, Microsoft will still be dabbling. The promise of the exchanges is that they allow ad sellers and buyers to negotiate specific pieces of inventory at the moment a Web surfer is engaged with them.

Entrepreneurs and investors in ad technology think this will allow dollars to flow into online display ads much more efficiently. Traditional publishers fear exchanges will commoditize ad inventory and push prices even lower.

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