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Microsoft to Power Blogs through Xbox

Posted: January 28, 2006

Microsoft’s Xbox, it’s flagship gaming product, is going to incorporate the Xbox with Spaces (Microsoft’s blogging platform) and then allow bloggers to monetize the blogs with Kanoodle (as reported by eWeek).

Microsoft’s impossible to find Xbox is internet enabled. Its users make up much of the ever elusive 18-25 male demographic. To date, the Xbox has allowed one to organize music and some other features, but hasn’t had any major internet capabilities outside of the gaming concept.

Kanoodle is a pay per click service that also serves contextual ads (ads based upon the text of a webpage).

This deal could allow Xbox users to post directly to a blog, keep track of high scores, cheats, tips, and anything else related to gaming (or just their life in general as many blogs are very similar to diaries), and make money off of the ads. Most likely it would be a revenue sharing deal with Microsoft. MS will handle the ad serving, the gamers write the content, they split the ad revenue.

A combination of gamers, blogging, and PPC ads could bring in the best of many worlds for Microsoft. It brings an elusive demographic into a centralized ad serving environment. It has the gamers creating the content, thus allows Microsoft to expand its content base with other people’s writings. To ‘pay’ these writers, it splits the profits with them.

How one will post to Spaces, opt in to the impossible-to-find-Xbox blogging platform, have ad control, and all the small details have yet to be released.

While this seems like small news, it’s a huge step in what I think is Microsoft’s real goal: To control the living room.

Roughly half of the US income is disposable; meaning it is spent on items besides the standard bills & rent. The leading portion of this disposable income is spent on entertainment: anything from iPods to game to DVDs to flat panel TVs, etc. We are an entertainment driven culture.

In the past, control of the living room has been in the hands of the major TV, stereo, and gaming console creators. Microsoft threw its hat into this lucrative market with the media PC and Xbox.

By combining the living room, the internet, and the associated entertainment into a single environment, it seems Microsoft has hopes of further controlling this disposable income. The last offering to really try to combine the living room with the internet was WebTV. WebTV didn’t have a lot of success, but did teach others some good lessons on combining these various aspects.

This interesting combination of the Xbox with the internet also has underpinnings of its own ’social network’ akin to Yahoo’s 360, Friendster, or MySpace. Social networking has been brought up time and time again over the past year by the major players as a way of recruiting and maintaining a stable user base. The goal is to have that user base vested in the site, friends, and content - thus the network owner can offer many free offerings to keep and grow the base, and the user base is thus monetized through ads or subscription fees. Its seen by many as a win-win combination. The user base has the chance to become part of a community and receive their own ’space’ on the web while the network makes money on the user base through a variety of means.

It has yet to be seen how Microsoft will combine all of these aspects in a central environment with the Xbox and Spaces. However, the concept is brilliant. The execution and adoption of users will be the ultimate decider of how well the play is executed.

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Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, Search Engines

Comments

One Response to “Microsoft to Power Blogs through Xbox”

Video Game Advertising Speculation | Visibility Genie on May 10th, 2006 7:34 am

[...] I recently setup my xBox 360 to connect to the live service so I can see how Microsoft is using the xBox to combine users to MSN Spaces and bring the community together via both the living room (via xBox) and online (via computer) and how it will develop and act based upon services, advertising, and the total gaming experience. [...]