Microsoft Corp. on Monday broke ranks with its struggling peers by forecasting 25 percent growth in online advertising for its MSN portal for the coming fiscal year in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The loss-making MSN Web portal is banking that deep-pocketed advertisers in the automotive and financial services industries will pull more money away from the traditional advertising media of television and radio and invest it in online ads. "They're spending between half a million dollars to several million dollars on the network already," Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of MSN personal services and business, told Reuters. "In EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), we think we can do better next year."
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