Five reasons your revenue could be fluctuating

The famous Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”

While he couldn’t fathom the realities of today’s Internet society, he still had the right idea — “hard work will pay off” — and with Yahoo! Publisher Network, the same holds true.

Our publishers often ask why their revenue is fluctuating. Many times, upon investigating, we find that the publishers themselves have made a slight change to their websites, or they’ve modified their marketing techniques. Either of these can cause revenue amounts to change.

To help you have success with your Yahoo! Publisher Network account, we put together five of the most common factors that may impact your revenue.

Pricing discounts for traffic quality 
Publishers should strive to host content that is unique and updated frequently. Good content will help drive repeat users back to your site, and with pricing discounts in place for our Sponsored Search advertisers, publishers could potentially see differences in their revenue when their quality varies. Clicks from low-quality traffic sources may be discounted to ensure that advertisers are paying an appropriate amount based on the value of the click.

The categories you target 
While we advise publishers to target specific ad categories for their sites, we generally recommend they select categories that are relevant to the content of their sites. For example, a website about popular vacation spots would probably not display ads about computer software. There may be instances where you may want to run different types of ads — a golf site, for example, might want ads for non-golf items that its readers might buy. But in general, ads that aren’t relevant to the site may result in a decrease in revenue.

The quality of your website 
Remember that the quality of a website plays a big role in generating revenue — you want your site to be a place where users trust your content and are comfortable clicking on the links. We encourage publishers to place their ads on content-rich pages that are well structured and provide for a good user experience.

Where your site is advertised 
One the most important factors affecting publisher revenue is where your site is linked to across the Internet. Listings in search engine results and Sponsored Search ads are widely used to market websites and drive traffic.

But these two methods alone do not guarantee results. For example, search engines constantly change their algorithms and as their search results are constantly changing, as well. A site displayed on the first page of results of a major search engine could suddenly drop in position, and traffic would drop right along with it. It’s vital to frequently monitor your weblogs or use third-party software to identify where the traffic to your site is coming from.

The subject and the season 
This is one of the most overlooked causes for any sort of revenue/impression drops or increases for an account. We often forget that searches and clicks are a direct reflection of what is happening in our society and on the calendar

For example, we received an inquiry from one of our publishers who received a good amount of traffic and clicks in May and June, but suddenly experienced a drastic drop in both impressions and clicks in July. We researched the account and did not find any underlying reasons for this sudden drop, but reviewed his website and discovered that it primarily focused on computers.

The increase in traffic was attributed to graduation season. During May and June, computer sales often rise in conjunction with college and high school graduation ceremonies, hence the increase in people searching for computers to give to graduating students. The mystery of the traffic fluctuation had been solved.

If these five factors don’t explain changes in your revenue, contact your customer service team.

— The Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Solutions Team

Publisher news bits from the blogosphere

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a partnership with HP and Intel to create a “global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.” What’s cloud computing? Well, we had to look it up, too, but the simple way to describe it is as a way for customers to tap into computing resources that can be anywhere, and only pay for what they use.

“Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way toward building the next generation of the Web,” says Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research. “As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.”

We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about the cloud computing project.

Picnik Basket
Are you a big shutterbug, or use a lot of photos from Flickr on your site? The Flickr blog recently announced they are working with the folks at Picnik on a nifty tool. Starting today, you can send a batch of uploaded pictures to Picnik for editing, crop and edit, and then save everything to your photostream.

MyBlogLog Overhauled
Calling all bloggers out there: Please report to the new MyBlogLog site and dig their new redesign. The sleek and clean design still has all the features you’ve come to know and love, but check out the New with Me feature, which now runs down the center of the page. Profiles in the past were pretty static, but now they become a dynamic representation of your current activity.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Selected publisher-related tidbits from the blogosphere

Are you a publisher who is constantly looking for the right image to post on your site? Well, we may not know what the best image is, but we can steer you to some free ones. The folks on the Flickr blog recently announced that Flickr is teaming up with Getty Images to create a collection of royalty-free, rights-ready and rights-managed photographs.

“Team Flickr has long wanted to create a way to make it easier for those who use photos as a part of their daily business to do so in a way that respects the talent and rights of our members,” say our Flickr colleagues on their blog. They also created helpful FAQs about the royalty-free collection and how to use it.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Publishers
Rebecca Sullivan on the RightMedia Blog recently posted some tips for effective publishing. “I have helped publishers from dozens of countries, with very different backgrounds, and with very different sites, and I’ve learned one thing: they’re not that different after all,” Sullivan writes. “There are some behaviors that are shared by many of our most successful publishers, so I’d like to present you with some of their best ideas, so you can use them and maybe even make lots of money.”

Mapping Your Peeps
The Groups Labs team recently launched the People Map Beta. If you’re a Yahoo! Group owner or a moderator, you can map members of your particular group.  They just have to complete a short information form that puts them on the map. You already know where they are in terms of common interests, but now you can see where they are physically.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Create your own version of Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! has been saying for a while that search should be open, and it’s tough to imagine it getting much more open than our new Web services platform — Yahoo! Search BOSS. BOSS, or Build your Own Search Service, is just that — a programming interface that lets you create your own version of the Yahoo! algorithmic search experience.

This is something that might help you strengthen your content as a publisher. What BOSS lets you do is pretty wide open. Read the Yahoo! search blog or our developer site for the gory techie details, but with BOSS you can re-rank natural search results or blend them with your own content; customize the search result presentation to match your user interface without Yahoo! branding or attribution; use a framework we provide to mash up BOSS search content with other data sources; access Web, news and image search; and get unlimited queries.

And what can you do with all of that? We’re sure you can think of something.

– The Team

A Mid-Summer’s News Catch-Up

Our colleagues at the Right Media Blog recently posted an article about the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and their efforts to broaden the coalition of publishers on the web. According to the IAB’s post “Small Publishers Unite! You Have Nothing To Save But Your Business,” the IAB is trying to “mobilize to stop politicians from unfairly and inappropriately regulating digital advertising.” Check it out for yourself.

Picture This
The Creative Commons Blog posted an article on how to help distinguish between Creative Commons, the public domain and all-rights-reserved images you may use on your site. Recently, some reporters from mainstream newspapers were confused about where certain images fell under, and as a result, there was some trouble. Many publishers use all three types of images, so it might be good for you to review.

Sounding Social
With so many free online radio stations and different music players, it’s a little daunting at times keeping up with the technology. Chris Lindsay of Yahoo!’s The Spark blog does a great job reviewing some of the many social music networks in the article “The Rise of the Social Music Networks.”

Private Matters
Some of you specialty publishers also participate on Yahoo! Groups, and their blog recently posted some tips on what privacy controls you have. It’s great info on how to control who can join your group, who can find your group, or who can see your group messages.

Just the Facts, Please
Many of us routinely use Wikipedia as our main source for facts, definitions and quick answers. A very informative piece in its own right, DistanceDegrees.com’s “Lose Your Wikipedia Crutch: 100 Places to Go for Good Answers Online” opens our eyes to a whole bunch of great places to get answers. Yahoo! Answers is one of the top Question and Answers sites mentioned. Of course, if you’d asked us that, we would have told you.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

The latest round-up of articles from the blogosphere

Are you the sharing type? Well, one of the best ways to share your ideas and content is with widgets. And you wouldn’t be alone — marketers and publishers are expected to spend about $40 million on web widgets this year, according to the Marketing Vox news site. Marketing Vox recently published a beginner’s guide to widgets, which are anything that can be embedded in an HTML web page. “One of the best things about widgets,” according to the piece, “is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content.”

Like music and chatting with your friends online? The Next* blog announced a new IMVironment that lets you do both. This new release enables you to keep chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger while listening to tunes from popular mp3 blogs. You can save the songs you like on a playlist and send your “remix” to your friend over IM, so they rock out too. 

O’ this social media world! There are so many nifty social media sites out there that it gets a little confusing as to how to keep connected. If you’re a publisher who uses several social media sites, you’ll be interested in this: MyBlogLog blog recently announced the MyBlogLog Connector, which helps you stay connected with various social media sites. “Connector is your own personal online social directory of where all your friends are!” the blog says. “We give you a list of all the people you consider a contact, and all the social web sites they are using. We not only tell you the places they hang out, but the exact table they are sitting at.”

Finally, if you’re still worried about staying connected or how you can constantly update your site, our friends at Boing Boing tell us that there is going to be WiFi available on American and Virgin Airlines. And to think I was excited when they gave me the full can of soda!

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Five guidelines to help keep you in YPN compliance

When reviewing YPN publisher sites for guideline compliance, I see the same “problem areas” over and over that prevent sites from passing the guidelines. Here are a few things to avoid in order to keep your site in compliance with YPN.

1. Competing Ads
Be sure that Yahoo! ads do not appear on the same page as contextual ads from other companies. It’s okay to rotate these ads along with Yahoo! ads as long as they don’t appear at the same time.

2. Unsupported Languages
Pages where YPN ads appear must be in either English or Spanish. Some publishers may manage quite a few web pages, and may only have a few pages in unsupported languages. It’s important to identify these pages and remove them.

3. Ad Targeting
When choosing to target ads, make sure that these ads actually match the content of the page. For example, the best quality traffic for a page about classic cars will probably result from auto-related advertisements rather than medical product ads or real estate ads.

4. Excessive Ad Units
We don’t allow more than three YPN ad units (the box containing the ads) on the page. Don’t clutter your page with too many ads. 

5. Page Functionality
To ensure a good user experience for our users, we require that the back button be functional, and that the page does not spawn any more than one partial pop-up/pop-under window.

Hopefully, these tips will help keep your site in compliance. If you would like more detailed information, you can always find it by taking a look at the Yahoo! Publisher Network Program Policies, and Terms and Conditions.

If you have more questions, contact our Customer Support Team. You can reach them online or by calling them at 866-785-2636.

— Marc Gibson, Yahoo! Publisher Network

Publisher-related news items from the blogosphere

The next time you’re stuck for an idea to run an image on your site, you may want to check out new Flickr groups feature for some creative inspiration. Recently, the Flickr blog announced a new groups tool that lets you add up to six photos or videos at a time from your Flickr account to share with friends.

Speaking of Flickr, the next* blog posted a story about a new technology by Yahoo! called BrowserPlus, which powers the PhotoDrop application. This application, which is still in development, allows users on Flickr to drag and drop photos instead of having to upload them. Sounds like a heck of a time-saving tool to me!

According to the next* blog, “The cool thing about the technology is that it will soon be open for anyone to use, so regardless of where you spend your time on the net, the folks who build the websites that you use will be able to make your uploads faster, and let you do a whole lot more right there in your browser.” Check out the prototype and let us know what you think.

Finally, Josh Bernoff at the Groundswell blog (which incorporates Forrester Researcher Charlene Li’s blog) just published “The real business model for Web 2.0: corporate clients.” Bernoff says, “it’s incredibly hard to make money as a Web 2.0 startup aimed at consumers.” He suggests turning the focus on corporate clients. 

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Open Search’s Graham Mudd discusses the benefits of Yahoo!’s new open search platform 

Earlier in the year, we ran an article about Open Search, a.k.a “SearchMonkey,” on our Search Marketing Blog. As a follow-up, we recently chatted with Product Marketing Manager Graham Mudd on how Open Search can impact publishers.

YPN Blog: What exactly is SearchMonkey, and what’s the goal of it?

Mudd: SearchMonkey is Yahoo! Search’s open platform. Our goal with SearchMonkey is to allow site owners, publishers and third-party developers to build applications that enhance the functionality and appearance of Yahoo! search results. These applications can be added by users from the Search Gallery, promoted by site owners and developers using a badge.

YPN Blog: How do publishers use it?

Mudd: They should visit http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey to get an overview of the program. Once folks learn the basics, we have full documentation and developer tools available for them to use.

YPN Blog: Sounds good. Here’s an obvious question: how much does it cost?

Mudd: Nothing. It’s free to all.

YPN Blog: How does it benefit publishers who are members of the Yahoo! Publisher Network?

Mudd: Well, we believe that SearchMonkey benefits all of the participants involved—publishers, users (searchers) and Yahoo!. By building more useful and attractive search results for their sites, publishers can see an increase in the quantity and quality of traffic from Yahoo! Search. And users, of course, benefit from a better search experience. This will likely increase user loyalty, which is a good thing for Yahoo!, too.

YPN Blog: So what does SearchMonkey mean for the industry as a whole?

Mudd: Semantic mark-up (RDF, microformats, etc.) is one of the primary technologies behind SearchMonkey. These technologies have existed for some time, and many agree they have the potential to make the web far more useful. Many site owners, however, have been reluctant to implement semantic markup because they haven’t seen a direct benefit in doing so.

YPN Blog: How do I qualify for Open Search?

Mudd: SearchMonkey is open to all sites and third-party developers.

YPN Blog: Sounds good. So, what do our readers need to do to get started?

Mudd: As a publisher, the most important thing you can do is share your structured data with Yahoo! Search using semantic markup, a data feed or page extraction. To get started, visit our overview page and then check out this overview for site owners.

— The Team

A trio of publisher-related news items from the blogosphere

Earlier this week, the Yahoo! Search Team announced changes to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. According to the Yahoo! Search blog, you may see some ranking changes and page shuffling in the index throughout the transition process, which should be completed soon.

Worried about robots taking over the world? Don’t be. They are our friends—especially the mini-robots mentioned in the MyBlogLog Blog. With the help of mini-robots, it’s really easy to refresh the thumbnail screenshot of your site on MyBlogLog. These new mini-robots take little screenshots of your site and upload it to your MyBlogLog community page. They may sound cute, but don’t underestimate their power. In fact, I for one welcome our new mini-robot overlords, I mean, mini-robot helpers.

Finally, the Yahoo! Developer Blog unveiled a sneak peak of the new BrowserPlus platform this week. The BrowserPlus platform, according to the blog, extends the Web. Among other things, that means you can add or update Web services without even restarting your browser. Some of the features that exist in the platform include:

• Drag-and-drop from the desktop
• Client-side image manipulation (cropping, rotation and filters)
• Desktop notifications

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications, aka Blog Wrangler, aka mini-robot friend