MSN adCenter's Content Ads Showing Horrible Click Through Rates?

Brent Csutoras published results of his Microsoft ContentAds test by accident. I wasn't able to see all the results because he pulled them after being notified that he is not allowed to share any stats because he is in a private beta. I can tell you that I tested the ads on my personal blog and actually removed them about a week ago, due to the poor results in revenue making.

That being said, what I did see Brent post in his MSN Adcenter’s Publisher Beta vs. Google Adsense, which is now 301 redirecting to the home page. He said that the CTR (click through rate) was a fraction of what he noticed with his Google AdSense ads. I believe it was less than half, but possibly even worse.

Clearly, a publisher program that gets paid out by click and not impression, with a low CTR is not a publisher program that publishers want to participate in. MSN Content Ads is still very new and in very limited beta. I suspect it will do much better in 2009, but it appears they still have a long way to go to earn the trust of publishers and take market share from Google AdSense.

Note, if anyone has a cached copy of the post, please share it with us. :)

Forum discussion at Sphinn.

Update: I received a screen capture of the original post and posted over here. You can see that the CTR with Google AdSense was .11%, but with Microsoft Content Ads it was .01% - huge difference and it showed in the earnings.

Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: New Years 2009

In this week's recap, I wish our readers and viewers a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009. Google updated the toolbar PageRank scores, but it seems like the search results both here and internationally were updated also. Live Search is using MSNBOT-Media to crawl JavaScript files. Google got hit with wildcard domain issues. Google Alerts is trigger happy. Google shows a did you mean answer for a child day care service, leading to a porn site. Google's strict image search option shows more porn than the moderate search. Danny Sullivan slaps Microsoft on their search initiatives. Microsoft's Content Ads program is doing poorly. Google AdSense is offending overweight people. Happy 2009 everyone!

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