Lovely weather here for this second day of Microsoft / Bing Search Summit in Seattle.

Have your heard about the upcoming Microsoft pubCenter ? Actually in Beta, this Microsoft’s new program is the equivalent solutions offered by Google AdSense. And it’s about to be officially launch in the next few weeks.

It offers the ability for website owners to enter Microsoft’s network and integrate text-based ads on their website. It’s actually only offered in the U.S and will help Microsoft to enlarge their contextual network.

For those who don’t know, the Microsoft Contextual Network includes several interesting websites divided in 2 categories : Microsoft Properties (MSN Money, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Health, Tech and Gadgets, Wheater, Autos,…) and Premium Publishing Partners (The Wall Street Journal, Fox Sports, CNBC, MSNBC). An expansion to iVillage properties (a network mainly focused on the women audience) is planned as well.

In the end, what will be the split of advertising revenue between Microsoft and website owners will be the crucial point in order to attract new websites and/or convinced others to switch from Google AdSense to Microsoft pubCenter.

In a next post, I’ll try to compare the performance of Microsoft Contextual Network with Google’s one in terms of CTR, as this is a metric that has room for improvement on contextual advertising networks…

This post was written by Alex