MSN is now sending out invites for advertisers to start participating in a beta for their upcoming ContentAds publisher advertiser program.
Here’s what I’d like to see out of the ContentAds program from a publisher’s point of view in order to differentiate it from what Adsense and YPN offer. Or these are at least my suggestions for them on how to generate publisher interest and gain the respect.
1. Display the revenue share that publishers are earning. I understand why Adsense and YPN don’t do this, but I think it’d be much more beneficial with publishers if they were up front about it.
2. Be open to international publishers. Yahoo’s taken some heat for not allowing international publishers or international ad impressions in their program.
3. Show publishers click-fraud data. Might not be anything publishers can do about it, but why not allow them to see any fraudulent clicks they are producing on their properties.
4. Make it easy for other applications to work with you. There is a nice opportunity for these publisher systems to work with applications like RMX Direct. We’d love to integrate with one or more of the contextual platforms to allow them to easily publishers to easily manage them along with the rest of their inventory. Adsense has an API, but you have to apply for it and we haven’t gotten a response, and YPN has no API as of yet. They’re missing out on business.
I’m sure there’s more, let’s hear your suggestions.
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Two more improvements:
1. If MSN (or YPN) wants to get more publishers to convert from AdSense, allow publishers to specify a minimum payment per click. For example, allow them to say, “don’t bother displaying ads if the payment is less than $0.03.” For me, I’d prefer to keep visitors on my site if the payment per click is really low instead of sending them away.
2. Allow publishers to specify that the link should open in a new window.
Those two alone would be a great boon to publishers and advertisers.
I’d like to run the MSN version of AdSense along side YPN, and AdSense and see who pays more. It will be nice to have a third participant in the contextual ad space.
I thought of a third item:
3. AdSense allows you to place more than one ad group on a page and not repeat ads. YPN and ContentAds would do well to allow this as well (assuming of course they have the inventory to do so).