Or is it just a spin and US "institutional" investors (you would need millions $ to participate according to what I read in the newspaper) were not willing to pay for it (AOL and myspace used to be quite popular too... ).

I do not get the annoying right frame banner while reading an email message in live.com/hotmail. So live.com email has less Ads than Gmail. This is amazing enough and I wish Gmail was showing less adds (either targeted or not).
Note: live.com is not my favorite email for other reasons :) but it is just better for the user about ads.