AOL in Deal With Microsoft to Take Over Display Ad Business

AOL will take over management and sales of display, mobile and video advertising that appears on Xbox, Skype and other Microsoft products in the United States, Canada, Japan, Brazil and five European countries. The move takes Microsoft largely out of the display ad business while giving AOL access to some of the web’s most popular destinations.

In turn, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will power search results and search advertising on AOL websites. The arrangement could lift Bing, long a second fiddle to Google, which is being displaced as the search engine of choice on AOL sites. The deal is the latest of several by Microsoft to focus on its core products, an effort pushed by Satya Nadella, its chief executive.