Penney, Best Buy, Hyundai and the daily deals site LivingSocial.com began offering teaser views of their ads on company and social media sites.

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By upgrading its display ads offering, Microsoft may be able to increase not only the revenue per page view but also the total number of page views through which it serves display ads.

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The response has been staggering -- nearly 4 million page views, 12, 000 user-generated ads and a cascade of tweets.

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