Yesterday, the Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive was finalized, with Microsoft looking to close the search engine traffic gap between itself and with Google/Yahoo.
With the acquisition comes the formation of the Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group which will serve advertisers and publishers.
This new business group will be responsible for building Microsoft’s monetization engine to serve the advertiser and publisher community. The APS team will assume responsibility for building and marketing all ad platforms, including Atlas, DRIVEpm, MSNDR and Microsoft® AdCenter, along with emerging media types such as in-game and mobile ads, and the agency arm Avenue A ¦ Razorfish.
This looks exciting, and forum members are hoping that there are new avenues of advertising for their perusal. However, this begs the question: with an acquisition that cost double that of Google's DoubleClick acquisition, why is Google being investigated?
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld (acquisition) and WebmasterWorld (APS group formation).
