Has Microsoft finally created a real competitor to Adsense?

Reports coming out of the US suggest that Microsoft has finally created a genuine competitor in  PubCenter to compete with Google’s Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network.  Although it is still in beta, it is receiving positive results. Microsoft’s PubCenter, which is a a self serve third party ad publishers platform similar to AdSense and Publisher Network.

YieldBuild, a US based ad optimisation company,  has just launched a new program for publishers which provides premium text ads to websites using Microsoft PubCenter as the source of high-quality text ads to run alongside existing text and display ads. YieldBuild uses computer algorithms to automatically optimize a website’s ad spots with the most profitable combination of ad layout, style, and network.

What’s interesting is that YieldBuild’s beta testers of the new text ad program with PubCenter ads have seen improvements of over 100% in effective CPM rates for clients, according to the company. But Paul Edmondson, CEO of YieldBuild says that the optimal ad plan for publishers is to have a mix of AdSense and PubCenter ads on their sites since both networks are highly complementary of each other.

Now qualified US publishers have a back door to start using PubCenter Ads, which has been in private beta testing since last summer. Edmondson confirms that PubCenter is an incredibly strong ad network that rivals AdSense. Google has dominated this space in the past  because it offers publishers higher fees for ads. However, this might change as Microsoft unveils PubCenter to the wider publisher community, particularly if Microsoft is aggressive in revenue splits to gain market share and this is the second report of high quality ads and higher CPMs with PubCenter than with AdSense.

Microsoft Pubcenter sounds like it will provide the sort of competition to Google that it is required for the market to work effectively and publishers to get the best service.  We can hardly wait for Pubcenter to get rolled out in Europe to finally give publishers some choice.

Link: Microsoft Pubcenter

Link: YieldBuild