Last week, Microsoft officially opened up PubCenter to the masses, allowing anyone to sign up for the ad program. We’ve written about how Microsoft’s PubCenter, a self-serve third-party ad publishers platform through AdCenter, was doing well with private beta testers over the past year, with PubCenter paying significantly more than competitors Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher (one particular site owner says he is receiving from four times more in revenue from Microsoft than Google AdSense). We are now hearing and reading on PubCenter forums that since the program opened up to the public last week, revenue has plummeted and many publishers are switching back to AdSense due to the sudden drop in payouts.
One publisher, who wishes to remain anonymous, said that Microsoft has cut his payout by 80 to 90 percent and that many of the publishers on PubCenter are leaving to go back to AdSense. According to our source, this new revshare went into place on either the 18th or the 19th of April. Here’s a direct quote from the publisher: “Realistically, Microsoft’s payout has been too high from the beginning, but this drop puts it well below the scope of being remotely competitive and instead files it under ‘worthless.’”
On the private forums, many publishers are outraged by the sudden drop in revenue. We’ve lifted some of the comments from several different publishers who are using PubCenter:
“My earnings have gone down by about 50 % over the last few days. I typically do about 8500 a month with PubCenter-I was doing around 7500 with AdSense prior, so I welcomed a new player. Unfortunately, unless this trend changes it will be back to AdSense for me. The most annoying part is knowing that nothing on my site or traffic has changed but instead that someone decided to adjust the revshare numbers.”
“I’m not seeing any drop with the other [ad] networks recently…it’s just the way it was last month…but here it’s a very steep drop in the last 3 days or so . . . . I am not sure if some updates have been rolled out. This is definitely something to be concerned about since the numbers we are seeing over the past days bring serious concerns.”
“April 20th is the lowest eCPM I have seen since starting this program, much lower than my other programs.”
“I haven’t seen eCPM this low since I started. The past 3 days have been extremely concerning. As far as my impressions go, I have been usually at the high end of my average. My average CTR has improved…not sure why eCPM has declined so sharply.”
Google is in the driver’s seat when it comes to serving ads on third-party publisher sites. The company has more advertisers chasing all those impressions, which tends to drive bidding way up. So even though Google only shares a small amount with publishers, they can outpay competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. That means Microsoft may have to actually take a loss revenue sharing just to get in the game. Their total revenue per click may actually be lower than what Google pays out in a revenue share, meaning to win publishers Microsoft may have to share more than 100% of revenue. That gets expensive fast.
I’m still with adsense..it is converting very well on doctor twitter..when I seen this I was thinking I had an alternative until reading all those nasty comments…:/
Microsoft has no idea how to run a program like this. What a bunch of clowns! Not to mention that their ROI for publishers is terrible! No one should EVER work with Microsoft in any ad-related areas. They are awful.
“Those clowns at Microsoft did it again. What a bunch of clowns.”
a 100% drop? a 200% drop?? Those guys certainly know what they’re talking about.
Sounds like a bunch of adsense propaganda to me.
It makes ZERO sense why microsoft would dish out big payouts during the beta then cut things completely off the day it launches to the public.
That would be the number one way to kill the program out of the gates.., if they are paying extra they can certainly afford to continue throught the public release.
maybe it was just a market research campaign to test viability.
MS wanted to sell me some CPM ads recently, for $.25-.50
Is it getting that bad or do MS ads suck that much?
If you are running a very large website then $0.25-0.50 isnt too bad at all. It depends upon your traffic and what geographic locations they wanted to run.
funny LOL
Microsoft can’t get anything right. look at their search engine, for example. but online advertising is immune http://iamned.com/blog/ to recession.
We have been a part of the MSFT beta and serve a few million ads/day. We were initially pleased with the payouts (they were about 30% more than GOOG on a CPM basis) but now have dropped 80% into dismal ranges.
We’re giving them a few more days then transferring it all over to AdSense if it doesn’t improve.
History repeating itself. Same exact thing happened when they launched their first contextual ad network a few years back. Many large forum sites jumped ship from AdSense, basked in the $2.00 CPM glory for a few months, then went back to Google for the stability when the CPM’s came back down to earth.
Another sad pubcenter user here. I have gone from making 300 a day down to 80 or less.
Also annoying about the situation is that the MSFT staff are giving canned answers on the forums as to what is going on.
A good alternative to the giants is https://partners.proximic.com
Be interesting to hear if any sites were doing some sort of A/B split between MSFT and GOOG. I can’t see MSFT slashing revenue by that much when the program is still in its infancy. I’ve seen my eCPM drop on Google over the last month.
What a joke…
I work for Chitika and I’m thoroughly convinced that we are the #2 player behind AdSense.
We have over 43,000 publishers that use our ads in addition to AdSense. We are the outlet for Yahoo’s Sonsored Search ads…not YPN.
Microsoft will get their act together, but it’s not going to happen overnight.
If you make money w/ AdSense…hit me up.
vik@chitika.com
ROFL Chitika is the worst overhyped ad network ever! Your ads suck! I wouldn’t want such ugly ads my blog again.
Is it a foregone conclusion that Google only shares a small amount with publishers? What is a small amount to you?
“So even though Google only shares a small amount with publishers, they can outpay competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft. ”
Really it would be great if you could report facts and let the readers decide…vs, what you are doing here…
I tested my own ads on my website and was able checking very well what I got: not even 20% of what I paid… smart priced? don’t think so…
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that M$ has adjusted the rev share.
It is completely possible that Microsoft had lots of high paying advertisers in beta when the number of publishers was low and was not able to scale up to meet the supply of ads being called during the public launch.
It is highly likely that they were just not ready for prime time…
Leena Rao: Did you ask Microsoft for a comment? Did you talk to any advertisers (AdSense or PubCenter) to see what they were paying?
We serve about 125,000 ad views daily and average an $11 CPM with Adsense. We were thinking of testing Pubcenter and we probably still will but this sounds like a joke if they actually are cutting their revshare so substantially.. If they have lower bids and CPMs, they need to offer a crazy high revshare if they ever expect to take market share from Adsense.
Wow, to make adsense payments look good it must be pretty dire.
I’m all for giving MS a second (third or fourth) chance but when it comes to online initiatives, their track record is horrible which is one of the main reasons that I hope they don’t take over Yahoo.
I’m trying to apply to pubCenter for my site but they don’t want to approve it for some reason. My site meets their requirements and nothing violates their policies. I tried contacting them through e-mail but got no response. I recently contacted a pubCenter employee on Twitter and he will look into it. While Adsense is good it’s better to try other alternatives as well.
I got into the beta with one of my sites but then they denied the exact same site after i submitted my ads for approval. After looking through their policies again I still can’t figure out what i am violating. Figures.
Is this a Google Fan Forum? I mean i find it interesting how the commenters hate so much on Microsoft just for the heck of it… geezus… it’s sad to see this..
pubcenter is only for us publisher ?
when it will be open for all means across the globe ?
still planning to give pubcenter a spin
competition is nice to have especially with the way Google has grown and 2nd and 3rd tier competition that fails pretty miserably
Why don’t Microsoft and yahoo open up to internation publishers? It’s crazy. I may live in India but a huge chunk of my visitors are from the US. I thought it’s the visitors location that mattered and not where the publisher live. Hell, I can live wherever I want to. This is both irritating and stupid.
I still may take a look at PubCenter to see how it pans out.
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I’ve had a good return from pubCenter so far.
I would advice sane minded people to avoid such negative posts as pubCenter is still in beta.
All Google fanboys can go suck something
Sounds like a bunch of absence propaganda to me.
It makes ZERO sense why microsoft would dish out big payouts during the beta then cut things completely off the day it launches to the public.