At the same time, Microsoft's unleashing Microsoft adCenter to the world in a bid to "evolve Microsoft from a software company into the world's largest, most attractive provider of online media."

Read more here about Microsoft adCenter.

While Google's led the field so far in "intelligent," contextual targeted advertising, Yahoo's and Microsoft's new efforts may give the search giant a run for its money…literally.

The market for online advertising is huge—$12.5 billion in 2005, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau—and shows no real signs of slowing down. With so much money up for grabs (and so much of it being spent on search advertising), investments of tens of millions (or $1.6million, the amount Yahoo spent for Overture in 2003) don't seem out of line.

But what does all of this mean for the rest of us? Besides the fact that any of us who have to deal with placing online advertising are going to have more and better choices, the most interesting part of the whole battle is Microsoft's stance. When the most powerful software company in the world tells us that it's trying to become "the largest, most attractive provider of online media," it's time for publishers to take notice.

Clearly, Microsoft's betting on an ad-supported future. From its Live product to these new investments in the search business, Microsoft is seeing a future where most of its revenue comes not from licensing software but from selling advertisements on applications and content being delivered over the Web. Considering where the market's going, it seems to make sense.

Or does it? A recent article published by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania examining the future viability of social networking sites got me thinking. On the surface, these are the perfect publishing models in which the infrastructure can be held to a minimum cost and the content supplied (for free) by users. This kind of model is tough to beat when compared with traditional publishing ventures that have to not only maintain a robust infrastructure but also pay writers, editors and support staff to keep them going. From a sheer economic standpoint, if you cut out much of the staff, you're going to make money.

Unfortunately it gets more complicated than that when you consider the question of online brand loyalty. As the Wharton article points out, social networking sites that are hot today can become pretty uncool tomorrow. Friendster used to rule the roost but has become a distant second to MySpace. Could the same thing happen to MySpace? I'm betting not only that it can, but that it will. Like social trends in general, fads come and go. They do have a built-in user base that gets "locked in" due to the effort that they spend setting up their spaces, but the real cost of switching to something bigger and better isn't all that high.

Readers are fickle. The "cost" for readers to "switch" to another site is non-existent—all they need to do is click a link and they're off to another site. Advertising-supported models require loyalty and sustained traffic to win. But for more "traditional" publishers (like this site, for example), keeping those users is a lot harder than in the print world. When the world is at readers' fingertips, they're going to let their fingers do the walking.

Perhaps that's why it's interesting to look at what's going on in the search world. Google has the highest brand loyalty on the Web and for good reason—it works consistently and gets you to all the stuff that you're looking for. While information on sites may come and go, Google's always going to be there for a lot of people as their main access point.

Content has become a commodity. The rise of popular "aggregator" sites (such as Digg, Slashdot and PopURLs has made this fact even clearer. Unless you can lock in readers via subscriptions or content that's unavailable anywhere else, readers will come and go as they please. The aggregator sites and search engines, on the other hand, don't have to worry about paying writers, watching trends, or being the victim of fads. In effect, they've become the new publishing vehicles of the Web. The rest of us are just providing the content, whether we like it or not.

So yeah, all these investments in search engines make a lot of sense. When content becomes a commodity, those who can get us to the content we want become the "publishers" we pay attention to. The next battles aren't going to be fought over the content but on the algorithms that help us find it.

Sean Carton is the chief strategy officer of idfive, where he helps clients understand the constantly changing intersections between design, marketing, communication, and technology.

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