MIVA launches Monetization Center for publishers

MIVA, among the top second-tier search engines, has launched its "Monetization Center" that lets website owners monetize their content/ web pages with sponsored listings from MIVA. The concept combines the features of contextual ad syndication offered by Google (AdSense) and Yahoo (Yahoo Publisher Network), as well as in-line contextual advertising programs like Kontera & Vibrant Media's IntelliText. This program is being offered for US & UK publishers only at this point.

One of the interesting features of the program (available only in the US for starters) is that publishers will be shown clearly their revenue share per click (something that Google does not show currently).

MIVA's attempts to expand its offerings and increase the reach of its search products include its Pay Per Call advertising and now the syndication of advertising. However to what extent will this initiative make a difference to MIVA's fortunes? May be, not a whole lot-- because of its advertiser base and reach, both of which of which are much lower than that of the other players in the market.

Windows Live Sandbox?

I am wondering if MSN Search, now Windows Live, has a "Sandbox" of its own, a la the dreaded Google Sandbox.

A newly-launched site that we are working on got crawled and indexed by both Google and Yahoo in about a week's time (give or take a few days), while it is not showing up in the Live Search index in almost a months' time.

It's not that the site doesn't have any genuine content--- there are some good content-rich pages, albeit a few.

This is quite baffling because the MSN search engine was the fastest in terms of adding pages to their index (at least showing them). As the entire SEO industry knows, it was also the easiest to get higher rankings on.

I haven't seen much (admittedly haven't looked around much either) from other folks about them experiencing a similar problem with Windows Live on their new sites. This is something we will be looking out for as we work on SEO projects for new websites.