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Yahoo! Publisher Network to Compete with Google AdSense
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc. (c) 2005


For the past four years, Google has been the undisputed leader
in search. Its rivals, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves have spent the
past few years working to narrow the vast technological and
popularity gap between them and the great Google. It has been a
long and hard fought series of skirmishes and battles but this
week, two of the three, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves
(http://news.stepforth.com/blog/2005/08/ask-jeeves-introduces-paid-placement.php),
signaled they might be getting closer.

In June 2003, Google made one of the wildest moves in the
history of the Internet by innovating on the paid-advertising
idea originally conceived by Overture. Already the most popular
tool among search engine users, Google gave website publishers a
revenue generating gift that kept on giving. Google's great PPC
innovation was to permit AdWords advertising to appear on
private websites, splitting the click-through fees 50/50 with
the private webmasters whose sites delivered traffic. By giving
private webmasters the opportunity to generate incidental
revenues by acting as billboards for AdWords, Google saw profits
from AdWords skyrocket while Internet users became conditioned
to accept the small and unobtrusive ads.

The paid-search advertising market is worth billions and is
expected to be worth tens of billions in a few years time.
Yahoo! is betting that market will support a growing network of
small to medium sized online publishers who will in turn bring
more revenues to Yahoo!. Google, which generates over 90% of its
enormous revenues from the AdWords program, might face serious
competition from Yahoo!, which currently receives about 60% of
revenues from paid-advertising.

This week, Yahoo! released a beta-test version of a similar
program known as the Yahoo! Publisher Network or YPN. Open to a
limited number of testers, including StepForth News, the YPN is
meant to compete directly with Google's AdWords program. The
beta is open, for the most part to US based users only.
StepForth is fortunate to be among the few non-US based beta
testers.

Yahoo! has had two long years to study the AdSense model and
appear to have adopted a unique publisher-focused philosophy
offering small and medium sized publishers access to syndicated
Yahoo! products and services in a bid to brand Yahoo! content as
well as Yahoo! generated paid-advertising. In other words,
Yahoo! is not only serving paid-ads to webmasters, it is also
helping them bulk site content with Yahoo! products such as
search, shopping, travel, RSS,  user-option personalization
featured, and eventually, Yahoo! syndicated music and video
services.

"Yahoo! has developed many highly successful relationships with
web publishers around the world, and is building on those
experiences to bring new revenue sources and compelling content
to even more high quality sites," said Bill Demas, senior vice
president, Yahoo! Partner Solutions group. "By helping the
broader publishing community maximize the value of their sites,
we aim to create an even more rewarding Internet experience for
publishers, advertisers and users."

Much like AdWords, YPN will be a revenue generator for
webmasters by delivering advertisements that match the topic of
the document they are placed on. The Content Match™ feature
enables publishers to place Yahoo!'s contextually-relevant
listings on their sites and receive a share of the revenue
generated by them. For example, ads that might appear in future
editions of the StepForth Newsletter would likely be about
search engines, search marketing, blogs, and/or tools for SEOs
and website designers. Contextually driven advertising is cool
but, profitable as it is, PPC is not the full story behind the
YPN.

The Internet is the backbone network of global communications.
Currently facilitating shopping, travel bookings, entertainment
and instant-research, the Internet has supplanted traditional
tools such as television and radio because it can easily mimic
both mediums while simultaneously performing a number of other
functions. Users interface with the Internet via documents that
are, for the most part, created and posted by small to medium
sized publishers. Yahoo! has adopted a publisher focused outlook
and is looking to place its brand on information and
entertainment content offered (eventually) on tens of millions
of websites.

As publishers from every medium understand, the key to success
is in keeping a captivated audience. One of the more interesting
features of the YPN will be access to Y!Q
(http://yq.search.yahoo.com/splash/start.html), a context-driven
search tool which is also in beta-test. Y!Q is a Yahoo! search
application that uses the topic of the document it is embedded
in or a trigger-word set by the webmaster to present search
results in a transparent overlay. The results shown in the
overlay consist of images, two news stories, and the first three
organic search listings. The logic is site users will stay on a
document instead of opening another search window and traveling
away from the site. Y!Q is an open-beta. Webmasters interested
in using Y!Q on their sites should refer to the Y!Q for
publishers page (http://yq.search.yahoo.com/publisher/embed.html).

Other integrated features in the beta include, Add to My Yahoo
and Yahoo Maps, showing an inclination towards local, mobile and
personalized search results.

"Add to My Yahoo!" (http://my.yahoo.com/s/guest-promo.php) will
help webmasters and publishers find their way onto user monitors
and personalized search results via the Yahoo! branded RSS feed
and subscription service. RSS stands for really simple
syndication and is basically a XML feed that delivers fresh
content to people who subscribe to it. As with Y!Q, Add to My
Yahoo! is already available for webmasters and publishers.

The inclusion of Yahoo! Maps (http://maps.yahoo.com/) shows
Yahoo!'s understanding that user or webmaster generated maps
are extremely important for local and mobile search users.
Yahoo! has recently introduced an API for Yahoo! maps allowing
webmasters to place geographic information on Yahoo! generated
maps.

Yahoo! timed the release of the YPN beta to coincide with next
week's Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. As beta
testers, we will be using some of these features in future
editions.

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Jim Hedger is a writer, speaker and search engine marketing
expert based in Victoria BC.  Jim writes and edits full-time for
StepForth and is also an editor for the Internet Search Engine
Database. He has worked as an SEO for over 5 years and welcomes
the opportunity to share his experience through interviews,
articles and speaking engagements. He can be reached at
"jimhedger@stepforth.com"
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