Pay-per-click and affiliate marketing network Miva has hired an investment bank to explore and evaluate strategic options, including a potential sale of the company.

Pay per click advertising is big business online. The two biggest players are Google Adwords and Yahoo's Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture, and before that Goto.com).

This isn’t exactly breaking news anymore. I decided a while ago that one of my first posts on this blog would be about Yahoo’s new publisher network. Unfortunately it took longer than I expected to get this blog up and going. I’m sure that by now many of you are already familiar with YPN, but I thought I’d go ahead with this anyway as its hard to find a bigger web publishing news story than Yahoo getting into the Ad Network game.

Microsoft's MSN division is looking for testers to try out its new adCenter product in the United States through a recently launched pilot program. Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of MSN, asked employees last week to invite businesses who might be interested in the service.

Microsoft has begun its paid search pilot program by rolling out its' beta pay-per-click interface, a product they call AdCenter. In order to review thier product I signed up for an account via their Singapore page.

Google’s paid search leadership is clear in this at least: both MSN and Yahoo are following their ad console set up.