Bing Ads is planning to add quality third party publishers to their network to display ads from Bing Ads advertisers.  David Pann made the announcement at Bing Ads Connect in Redmond Thursday.

The program would be similar to Google AdSense, with ads being displayed on publisher sites that are triggered both through search and contextual.  They are looking at adding high quality sites, for both mobile and desktop.

They are looking at both “head and tail” websites, however they stress quality is the most important aspect of it.

“Traffic quality is important,” says Pann.  “Anything we do will be driven by quality.”

Having another player in the contextual advertising space for publishers would be welcome.  Google AdSense is the only program that many websites qualify for, and many publishers would jump at the opportunity to test AdSense against a strong competitor.  It also could draw a large number of publishers who have been suspended from Google AdSense as well, so watching publisher quality would be key.

It also gives Bing Ads advertisers more options to see their ads running in more places.  One of the biggest complaints about Bing Ads is simply wanting more traffic and ad impressions, and adding third party publishers would help with that problem.

It is also an important move as Bing Ads will be launching retargeting in December.  Having third party publishers running Bing Ads would give Bing more properties to display retargeting ads on.