Have you ever wished for someone to come along and compete with “Google’s Adsense Program”? With the launch of “Yahoo’s Publisher Network”(YPN) you could say that some wishes really do come true.
If you’re not familiar with Adsense or YPN, both programs allow you to add specialized coding to your website pages and then display text-based ads which are related to the content on the page. For example, if you have a sports related website theme, then ads would be shown for sporting goods and services.
Google had this market cornered for a long time, but with YPN there’s now some “friendly competition” — which is a good thing for everyone involved.
Yahoo’s Publisher Network (YPN) is currently in beta and only available to publishers in the United States. You can apply for the program at http://publisher.yahoo.com Word on the “Internet Street” is that Yahoo hopes to be out of beta by the end of the year and has plans for offering additional services as well.
Once accepted into the program (which they’re calling “Content Match”), you’ll need to log into the YPN control panel to select your ad formats and colors. There are 10 different ad unit sizes to choose from. For example: Square 250X250, Large Rectangle 336X280, Small Rectangle 180X150, Banner 468X60, and so on. Most of the sizes offered are similar to those you’ll find on Google’s Adsense.
Customized color schemes can be created for your ad lay- out, or you can go with any of the standard ad colors. You can set background color, text and link colors.
YPN offers full reporting and tracking capabilities. You can track up to 50 channels to find out which pages and ads are your top performers.
Once the code is in place on your pages, Yahoo will crawl your site’s content to insure that relevant ads appear. If no targeted ads are available, public service ads will be shown.
YPN gives you a bit of control over competitors’ ads showing up on your site, with the option of blocking up to 200 of them.
In their efforts to differentiate themselves from Adsense, YPN is also offering something called “Ad Targeting.” This allows you to choose up to two ad categories for your entire site, or just for specific pages. This is done in order to target your visitors with ads based on their specific interests. This in no way guarantees that only ads from those categories will be shown; it just gives Yahoo a better idea of what types of ads you’d like to see appear on your site.
You can choose up to two categories per targeted URL, to a maximum of 50. If you don’t see a category that fits your pages you can always suggest it be added. There are currently 20 categories to choose from. For example “automotive, B2B, computing,” with 109 sub categories.
If you’ve been showing Google ads on your site for some time now and are thinking about adding YPN’s to increase your revenue, keep in mind it is against Yahoo’s terms of service to display any other contextual ads on the same pages as theirs. So if you want to run both programs on your site you’ll have to put one on each page, or get your hands on a rotation script that will rotate both ad types, one at a time, on all pages of your site. One such script can be found at Shoemoney
Another really nice feature that Google is lacking is Yahoo’s “Balance Transfer Option.” If you also use Yahoo’s Search Marketing Program for your pay per click advertising and you use the same user name and password for both, you can transfer money from your publisher network account at YPN to your sponsored search account. There are no minimum amounts for transfers and you’ll need to manually make the request in order to move the funds, but this is a handy feature.
When it comes to payday and any earnings you may have coming to you, there is a minimum payout of $100.00 before Yahoo will cut you a check. Checks are sent 45 days after the close of the calendar month. For example, any earnings made in September will be paid to you by November 15th. I’d like to see them shorten up the pay cycles in the future, as most small entrepreneurs generally need cash sooner rather then later.
It’s going to be interesting to watch this new race heat up between Google and Yahoo. Competition is always a good motivator and who knows, it may encourage Google to offer new features as well knowing they don’t have the corner on the contextual market.
Keep your eyes peeled for future changes and enhancements and may the best man win!
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