Yahoo! Publisher Network Plans For The Future

What are the plans for Yahoo! and YPN in the future? Well this spring they have some things in the works.

From Search Engine Journal who spoke with Yahoo! last week about their plans. I've bolded the ones I feel are relevant and will actually work..

1. Improvements in Relevance : The ads that are shown by YPN are based upon what Yahoo calls its ‘matching expert’s. These ‘experts’ will be expanded to include :

* Contextual Engine : Targeting based upon the content of the page

* Ad Targeting : Publishers can “tag” their own site by defining their ad targeting category in the YPN admin

* User Data : Behavioral targeting or profiling (geographic & demographic)

2. Wire Service : Offering publishers payment via direct deposit this Spring

3. Expanding Invitations : Continuing on reviewing and approving thousands of high quality web publishers

4. International Rollout : Global expansion beyond the United States to English and non-English speaking countries

5. Yahoo Search Box : Publishers can add Yahoo Search to their site which will pay publishers a percentage of sponsored search revenue

6. Integration into Yahoo Answers : Yahoo may be offering its registered users the ability to earn revenue or points for contributing to Yahoo Answers and other user generated content offerings.

One thing of note is that I didn't bold the behavioral targeting above because I think it's just too experimental at this point and it would be years before it was actually in place and working satisfactorily.

I'm not too interested in most of the stuff above though others would be. I'm not International, I'm already in the program and I've never been a fan of the search boxes.

The search boxes don't seem to work too well for me. Maybe I'm using them wrong. I'd prefer to use internal search where it gives people pages on my site since there's a better chance (in my opinion) that if they go to other relevant pages in my site they may become a regular reader, sign up for my feed or email updates or click on another ad on another page.

I don't particularly care about Yahoo! Answers either. I'm looking at advertising, not answering questions for a nickel.

The big one up there is EFT, Electronic Funds Transfer, which Google already has and is the last piece in totally automating the system and generally making publishers happy.

Their context engine sucks right now. When I was running them all I got was run of network ads for most of Diggers Realm. There's only so many Vonage and Mortgage ads I can take.

Also being able to tag your site to a category is great, if it works. I can just see all the sploggers out there salivating at tagging their site for high paying keyword areas even if their content isn't relevant. This area will be massively open to abuse and if they don't have a good way of policing it will make things worse. It's probably one of the reasons Google hasn't rolled something like that out yet though it is a high requested item from publishers.

Tipped by AdMoolah

Performancing and Problogger also covering this.

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