There's a way you can stop (or delay the inevitable) MSFT from shutting down MSFT Ad Monetization Platform

Question

A Federal lawsuit can be filed so that a Federal judge can issue an injunction against MSFT before the lawsuit proceeds.

It can take months to years or more for the lawsuit to be settled unless MSFT can successfully ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit.

Food for thought.

Answer 1

Big companies do not care much about the ad income from Microsoft store. Small indies even do not have the money for the process to sue Microsoft.

It is very sad to see Surface NEO at the end of 2020 without a working ad platform. Many UWPs with Microsoft AdControl will fail on Windows 10X.

Whoever made this decision is only considering the short-term and small financial impact rather than long term benefits in the developer ecosystem.

How much money will it cost Microsoft to run the ad platform? How about we keep just a small team in China/India? How about we only keep some of the ad providers? Why does Microsoft simply shut it down rather than considering some workarounds? The company has a cash reserve of more than 100 billion USD and it decides to ditch its developers and users if it cost them 0.01 billion USD or even much less. 

Someone in Microsoft should stand up and stop this before it's too late. This should happen inside Microsoft. Is Microsoft too bureaucratic that no can speak out? Is Microsoft too big and not nimble at all? We have many questions and speculations.

Answer 2

Hi,

I fully understand your feelings about shutting down Microsoft Ad Monetization platform. It has been proved to be a very good way to improve developers' income. But this must been discussed for a long time so that this news could be officially announced. 

If you have more concerns about this. Please feel free to open a support ticket here: Contact Us. Choose to Contact us, select Dashboard for Topic and select Ads in apps for issue type.

Best regards,

Roy

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Answer 3

Hi,

I fully understand your feelings about shutting down Microsoft Ad Monetization platform. It has been proved to be a very good way to improve developers' income. But this must been discussed for a long time so that this news could be officially announced. 

If you have more concerns about this. Please feel free to open a support ticket here: Contact Us. Choose to Contact us, select Dashboard for Topic and select Ads in apps for issue type.

Best regards,

Roy

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We invite you to post new questions in the "Developing Universal Windows apps" forum’s new home on Microsoft Q&A (Preview)!
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mr Roy, May I ask one simple question? What do you mean in the announcement “it’s not viable for us to support the platform”. Does the platform has a high cost to operate or is something else, eg the company’s strategy. And one more question: You wrote that “this must been discussed a long time ago...” I’m not a native English speaker and I apologize for that, but what do you mean with this ? There were internal discussions in Microsoft about the future of Ad Monetization . No developer had an idea about that. We are all surprised. And if this is the case, you have discussed internally a lot before taking this decision and announce it, can you please tell us if there are other internal discussions for the whole ecosystem? Maybe shut down the Store, maybe stop Visual Studio, maybe something else... Sorry if I sound rude to you, believed me I’m always polite with others. These two questions are very important. The idea of sending a support ticket (to whom really?) is a little funny. Many wise people say that in life, if you really want to understand someone else and his behavior you must try to think if you were in his position. It’s very difficult to achieve this, but you will be a better person. So, please for a moment, try to think that you are a developer that this decision breaks your future plans and your company’s life and please answer to us. This situation is more serious than someone thinks. Best regards, George

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M.I.L. Apps

Answer 4

The announcement in the forum is very weird. Why isn't there a blogpost to explain the whole thing? 

Whoever made the decision does not have the gut to publicly talk about the reasons behind and future plans. Will you close IAPs as well?

Opening a case to the developer support team does not help at all. The issue is public and should be resolved here in the forum so that all developers know the answer. The engineers who will respond to technical cases are not decision makers and they can do nothing to help.

Someone among Microsoft's 150K employees should take the responsibility to explain and make some good changes.

Answer 5

Respectfully, lawsuits are a super bad idea and IMO a dead end.  In this particular situation a plaintiff would have no case.  Microsoft has just as much right to chose to do business with you as you do with them.  Nothing lasts forever.  The store developer agreement indemnifies Microsoft pretty thoroughly.

Flip it around - assume you had a customer that sued you and somehow convinced a judge/jury to force you to keep working with them (unlikely without a contract).  How well would you support a customer like that?

The best thing you can do for yourself and your business is to start looking for new platforms.  Spending negative energy achieves nothing.

I'm impressed anyone from MSFT even replied to this - most companies would ghost you at the mention of litigation and then only interact with you when forced through court filings or a registered agent.  It is not a good road to travel, seek success another way.

Answer 6

What other AD platforms will work?  I haven't found or heard of a viable replacement?

MS should opensource the adcontrol and the associated infrastructure and let the community take it over.