AdMoolah News and Views

Techcrunch is reporting that publisher are having some good, early success with MicroSoft AdSense competitor, called PubCenter.

Some quotes from the article:

Our tipster says that he receiving from four times more in revenue Microsoft than Google AdSense. And the money isn’t the only advantage PubCenter has over AdSense. The advertisement themselves are are higher quality than Google’s ads, he says, and equally as targeted towards the content.

We also heard that Microsoft is allowing publishers to get creative with ads by allowing them to set background images. Google AdSense only allows publishers to change the color of the ads.

This could be great news for current AdSense publishers. We need a serious competitor. Yahoo has been trying with its Yahoo Publisher program (which has been languishing in beta since 2005), but most people report being very disappointed by the earnings..

Here is an interesting Google test I came across today. It looks like they are testing putting small icons beside the URL in some ads. Here is a screen shot:

Google is always testing changes like these to a limited set of users to see what affect they have. My guess is that these icons will increase the click-through-rate on these ads. There have been some other reports from people seeing these as well, but my screen shot is the first I’ve heard of a US based search showing these results.

I’m sure if these icons do increase click-through-rates, publishers will like the addition!