Microsoft has released a digital advertising platform for India in association with four leading portals to facilitate digital advertising by bringing together both the advertisers as well as the portals on the same platform.

The newly launched digital advertising platform will provide display, contextual and video advertising solutions for its partners. Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions' sales partner NDTV Media would bring the advertisers to the platform.

"In the last one year, the online advertising market has grown rapidly," said Rajnish, India Head, Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions. "the time is right to build a large digital eco-system by connecting advertisers and publishers on a Platform."

The Redmond giant is slated to offer advertising solutions with partner portals at more economical rates compared to the newspaper ad charges.

India has just over 400 online advertisers, while there are 9,000 in television and over 200,000 print advertisers, much ahead of the online advertisers. However, what's promising is the Internet base of 40 million users and counting. Analysts are of the opinion that online advertising could very well turn out to be the medium of future.

At present the online advertising industry is valued at Indian Rupees 5 billion or about 124.66500 million U.S. dollars and is growing at a rate of 55 – 60 percent.

Microsoft plans to increase the present association with four publisher portals to over a thousand in the coming three years. While the present figures aren't striking as the online advertising industry currently constitutes a mere 1 per cent of the total advertising space, the Redmond giant's new platform plans to completely change the existing perception about online advertising industry.

"This digital ad platform is significant because of two reasons," says Rajnish. "It simplifies the processes of advertising online and also provides advertisers an opportunity to reach out to a diverse and high quality audience."

In order to achieve its targets it would need to attract more and more advertisers and publishers through to this solution, however the challenges of changing the perceptions and basic infrastructure continue to exist.

Microsoft had unveiled its India specific online advertising programs in May last year, see: Microsoft Expanding Digital Advertising And Social Networking In India. Recently, Yahoo too had shown interest in capturing India's huge base of mobile users, see: Yahoo! India: City And Maps On Mobile Coming Soon!.