Microsoft has announced that later this year, they will begin to place advertisements on the 360 Dashboard. Obviously this will drive a great deal of revenue to Microsoft, but aren’t you 360 users already paying microsoft for the service? To me this seems like an unnecessary way to make money, but they say it wont impact the overall gaming experience, you just have to deal with annoying ads on your dashboard now. More from Microsoft’s Larry Hryb below:

I need to let you know that you don’t need to worry about a huge influx of ads across the dashboard. One of our core principles is to enhance, not interfere with the gaming experience, and we work directly with our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the LIVE community. Silverlight will help make those ads a more organic part of the dashboard, like we’ve done with some of the NXE slots in the past. No one on the team wants to turn the dashboard into something that looks like like Shibuya Crossing. That’s just not good for anyone.

So there you have it, hopefully this wont get to out of hand, but I expect a great deal of backlash from customers on this considering Microsoft already gets $50 a year from their Live customers. Image courtesy of Kotaku.