Microsoft Adcenter, Adsense Alternative?

I run several websites and blogs and on some of them I use Google Adsense. However changes in the Adsense programme have made revenues fall dramatically. Among my criticisms of Adsense as a publisher are:

• Poorly targeted Advertising
• Lack of control over advertising – MFA (Made For Adsense Spammy websites) cannot be stopped effectively by a filter limited to 200 sites.
• Scrollbars on Adverts allowing more advertising and thus more poor quality sites.
• Reduction in clickable area – fair enough,  I suppose.  To reduce the number of false-clicks but it has undoubtedly contributed to lower revenues.

All of these factors just make me want to ditch Adsense and find something new. Could Microsoft’s Adcenter provide an alternative to Adsense?

At first glance Adcenter seems to work in a similar way to Adwords. Advertisers are charged an initial sign-up fee of $5 before they can start creating advertising. Advertising is displayed alongside search results from Live and on MSN affiliated websites as shown high-lighted in green in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Live Search Sponsored Results

For publishers, there are two ways in which Microsoft Adcenter differentiates itself from Adsense. These are the degree of control over how the advertising is displayed and the ability to rotate ads. SEO Scoop has information on how it all looks. This all seems rather superficial unless it is possible to customise your advertising to look exactly like your web site to increase conversion rates.

What really matters for publishers is the revenue they receive, which in turn is dictated by the conversion rate of advertising they are listing. With Live currently serving less than 6 percent of search queries, it is difficult to see whether Microsoft has a large enough share of the search engine market to pull this off.

If you are an interested publisher, living in the US then you can sign up at the Microsoft site. For advertisers, you can sign-up here. It will be interesting to hear about how it works out.