Daily NewsGrok 

Here’s a lively discussion on Publishing 2.0, where publisher Scott Karp, as well as Yahoo!’s Matt McAlister and Jeff Jarvis from BuzzMachine, talk about the impact of social media on advertising and the decreasing CPM that new technology offers. Go there >>

That you can transfer funds from your Yahoo! Publisher Network account into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account?

If you have a Yahoo! Search Marketing account as well as a Yahoo! Publisher Network account, you can use the same user name and password for both accounts and transfer funds from the available balance of your Yahoo! Publisher Network account into your Yahoo! Search Marketing account. This allows you to finance or partially finance your Search Marketing budget with proceeds from your Yahoo! Publisher Network account.

To transfer funds, go to the Payment Options page under the Account Information tab.

Use the pull-down menus and dialogue boxes to transfer any amount available.

Please note, however, that while you may transfer funds from your Yahoo! Publisher Network account to your Yahoo! Search Marketing account, you may not transfer funds in the opposite direction, from your Search Marketing account to your Network account.

Not familiar with Yahoo! Search Marketing?

It’s a Yahoo! service that can help you connect with users searching for what your site has to offer. For more information, check out the Yahoo! Search Marketing homepage.

For more information, please review our FAQs.

— The Team

Philippe Daix
Publisher
HoopsVibe.com
TopSpeed.com

One of Yahoo! Publisher Network’s top revenue performers, Philippe Daix, has made a livelihood by understanding what drives sports fans. From his single account, Philippe publishes ads to two sports-related Web sites.

HoopsVibe.com, which Philippe launched with pal, Romain Rousseau, in 2001, is targeted at the basketball fanatic. Whether it’s news and rumors about pro hoops or videos of street ball action, tips on vintage-style b-ball gear or a rough-and-tumble open forum that lets fans go strong to the basket on their pet players, HoopsVibe.com’s got it. 

“I first started this publisher activity to fill my spare time,” the 33-year-old explains from his home in Miami, “then my best friend, Romain, came up with the basketball idea. He’s the basketball fan. A few years later, I decided to setup TopSpeed.com, because I am more into cars and speed.”

TopSpeed.com is to car crazies is what HoopsVibe.com is to basketball fans–a space where enthusiasts can read about racing, argue over cars, play driving games, examine auto specs, view videos of car crashes (may favorite page, I have to admit) and more, all in a media- and interaction-rich environment.

One of the things you’ll notice on both sites is the interesting mix of contextual ads. While many pages feature basketball- and automotive-specific ads, others feature ads about fitness equipment, health programs and even grooming products.

“We found out that our audience is interested in health and beauty, even though that is not the main topic of our Web sites,” Philippe explains. “Sports fans and car fans are very much into the way they look–on the playground or at the traffic light.”

Philippe uses the Ad Targeting feature to tweak the ads that appear on his pages: “The tool helped us find a compromise between ad relevance and ad revenue. We’re always testing to explore categories revolving around our content… The ultimate engine in all this is the opportunity to make a living out of it.”

Key take-aways from this successful publisher? Be passionate about what you do and, above all, know your users. 

Know a publisher in our Network that would make a good Spotlight? Maybe it’s you! Send us your nominations.  

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

During my undergrad years in the college town of Lawrence, Kansas, I once ate at a unique restaurant called Potato Mountain Café. Potato Mountain offered more than 100 varieties of mashed potatoes–including some only-in-a-college-town menu items such as “pepperoni pizza mashed potatoes.” In an unfortunate turn of events that left many couch potato co-eds with a severe loss, the restaurant closed shop in 1999.

So far, the Web’s version of Potato Mountain Café’s mashed-up specialties seems to be facing a more fortuitous fate. A “mashup,” according to Wikipedia, can be defined as “a Web site or Web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” And over the past year, thousands of sites and applications have appeared on the Web that fit the above definition.

These sites are the creative output of developers and programmers who take existing structured data sources from third-parties such as APIs and RSS feeds, then combine them and add a user interface to create easy ways to access, view and interact with previously unrelated data. 

The term “mashup” actually comes from the music biz, where it refers to DJs who mix together music from different sources to create a completely new song. But the easiest way to understand what we mean by Web mashups is probably just to play around with a few: 

• Rollyo uses the Yahoo! Search API and lets you create your own personal search engine restricted to specific URLs and tags.  You can also access and use personalized search engines created by celebrities and topical experts.
• BashR allows you to search for a term, then it provides results pages that mash together information from a combination of Wikipedia, flickr and del.icio.us–sources that all consist of user-generated material.
• Fifa World Cup 2006 Mashup takes the Yahoo! Maps API and combines it with 2006 World Cup soccer schedule data. And voila!, you can learn the where and when for catching your national team in action.

Mashups can take a variety of shapes and formats, but the common element among them is that they take existing data points and build new services out of them. For a list of more mashups to check out, go to the Yahoo! Gallery (beta) and also take a look at programmableweb. 

The Yahoo! Publisher Network openly supports developers and other Web entrepreneurs who are working to improve the quality of the Web. We love to see publishers like Ning as part of our network, as they are providing a free service to help people clone, customize and share mashup-style Web applications. We attended and hacked away at the first Mashup Camp, which took place February 20 and 21 in Mountain View, California (Click here for a robust set of discussion notes from the event).

We also fully promote the efforts of our sister group here at Yahoo!, the Yahoo! Developer Network which is working across Yahoo! to help Yahoo! teams expose APIs and data feeds for developers to access and mash together. And we’re thrilled to be part of an overall organization that supports not only the efforts of the Yahoo! Developer Network, but also structured internal company events such as Yahoo! Hack Day. This creative and fun day was focused around the idea of letting our own developers take a day every so often to flex their innovation muscles and build their own hacks and mashups. 

If you have a mashup that you want us to know about, please drop us a line. And if you don’t have a mashup yet, get the crazy “Web-DJ” developer side of your mind going and spin something off!

— Cody Simms, Product Manager

If you are not already familiar with Ad Targeting, it’s a feature that allows you to better match the ads on your site to the interests of your users.

If your site is mainly about finance, for example, you can choose “Financial Services” as your major ad category. You can also choose subcategories: Within “Financial Services” you can select from eight subcategories, from “Accounting and Taxes” to “Investment.” If you think your audience is interested in electronics, you could tap “Electronics and Appliances” as your major ad category and “Consumer Electronics” as your subcategory. At present there are 20 categories and 109 subcategories to choose from.

Setting up Ad Targeting is easy. It requires no cutting and pasting of code, just some simple selections on the drop-down menus in the Ad Targeting section under the Ad Setup tab.

• Select the ad categories and subcategories that you think will be most appealing to your visitors.
• Enter the Targeted URL in which you would like to see these ads appear. If you would like the ads to appear throughout your web site, enter your domain URL.
• Click the “Save” button and verify that your selection appears correctly in the Manage Ad Categories section.

Selecting ad categories doesn’t guarantee that only ads from your selected categories will appear. Rather, the categories you select are used as a suggestion for serving ads, and we employ other technologies to select ads relevant to your site.

Your selected ad category should be taken into consideration in determining which ads will be displayed on your web site within about four to six hours. You may update your ad categories at any time and as often as you want. Even if you add, change or delete categories there’s no need to update the ad code.

If you opt not to select any ad categories, your site will display contextually-matched ads based on your content alone.

Don’t see an ad category that best matches your audience’s interest or your content? Let us know using the Customer Support Form. If you have more questions about Ad Targeting be sure to review our FAQs.

— The Team

Yahoo!’s resident toublemaker weighs in on the past and present of contextual advertising

When people can’t think of anything particularly good to say about their job, I often hear “well, it pays the bills…”, which often elicits a response of “yup” and a knowing nod.

In all the excitement surrounding self-serve contextual advertising in the last few years, people often overlook one of the more important byproducts: the fact that it pays the bills.

Now I don’t mean to suggest that millions of people are making a living off this stuff, but a lot of people are recovering the costs associated with hosting and updating a personal or semi-professional website.

Thinking back six or eight years, I remember how difficult it was to get a personal website online.  First, you had to register a domain name. That used to cost easily ten times what it does today and it was far less user-friendly. Next you needed a hosting provider. They also cost a lot more and delivered far less. Then you had to track down and assemble all the publishing tools and utilities: graphics editing, FTP client (upload forms were far less common), log analysis (hard to use), HTML authoring, and so on.

Then, as many of us discovered, keeping it up to date was a daunting task that often involved multiple tools, lots of tweaking, and nearly infinite patience. Content management systems were big, expensive things that mere individuals didn’t toy with.

All that work just to watch the hit counter go up a few digits per week. “Show me the money?” There wasn’t any!

As with so much in the high-tech world, time–and the demands of publishers–has solved many of our problems. Back then, early-adopter publishers like us knew that the tools would get easier to use, cheaper and faster. Connectivity would improve, more people would come online, and so on. And what do you know? We were right! We now have great graphics tools, free or low-cost software programs, web-based content management services and dozens of low-cost hosting providers to choose from.

But rarely did anyone suggest that our sites could ultimately pay for themselves (without resorting to e-commerce or auctions). Maybe that’s why this self-publishing revolution is still downplayed, even ignored, in the media—the fact that few of its members, if any, foresaw it.

That’s fine: Being under the radar has served to fuel the revolution in some pretty amazing ways — amazing enough “pays the bills” for thousands of publishers, anyway.

Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search

J.Z. spoke this morning at Webmaster World.

On the frontiers of Web-based journalism and contextual advertising

Jonathan Weber
Publisher & Editor in Chief
NewWest.net

Jonathan Weber is no stranger to the Western spirit. He’s a media pioneer who doesn’t have much patience for maintaining the status quo. 

“I’ve felt for a long time that newspaper journalism in this country has gotten trapped by its own formulas and conventions,” says Weber, founder and editor-in-chief of the Rocky Mountain-focused news and info site, NewWest.net. “The big stylistic contribution of blogs has been to cut through this and write in a direct, straightforward way and invite the readers into the conversation…”

In the early days of the dot-com revolution, Weber co-founded The Industry Standard (with John Battelle), a cutting-edge print and Web publication that documented the uncanny rise of the Web as a for-real business, competing directly with pubs such as Business 2.0, Upside and Fast Company.

Unfortunately, when the boom went bust, The Industry Standard went with it. Weber, a veteran newspaper man who has written and edited for The Los Angeles Times, among many other outlets, went “back west” to Missoula, Montana, in 2002. There, he took up teaching at the University of Montana’s journalism school, settled down, got hitched, and started NewWest.net.

Read the rest of this entry »

That you only need one Yahoo! Publisher Network account to serve ads to multiple Web sites? 

One account is all you need to manage ads on multiple Web sites. Just cut and paste the ad code we provide to the sites you want to display ads on —there’s no need to update your account information. You can also add each of your domains on the Reporting URLs page under the Reports Tab, so that you can track your performance by Web site.

What’s more, you can use Ad Targeting for multiple web sites. Just go the Ad Targeting page under the Ad Setup Tab, add a new URL in the Targeted URL box, and select your categories. Each time you save a URL, it will appear in the Manage Ad Categories table below. From here you’ll be able to manage your categories for each of your Targeted URLs.

For more information, review our FAQs.

— The Team

Ads in RSS can help you reach more users through your RSS feeds 

In case you missed it or you’re new to the network, we launched the beta of our Yahoo! Ads in RSS product back in November, 2005.Yahoo! Ads in RSS allows you to place Content Match ads directly into your outgoing RSS feeds, so that your end users will see them in their RSS readers and have the opportunity to click on them, earning revenue for you.

Typical Yahoo! Ads in RSS look like this:

I use a Bloglines.com reader, but the ads will appear in most readers as long as they’re not blocked by the end user (a few readers have that capability).

If you’re new to RSS, or are not sure how to use it and want to learn more, check out our open-access Publisher’s Guide to RSS.

The nickel tour goes like this: “RSS” is an abbreviation that stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it’s an XML-based technology that allows webmasters to syndicate (distribute) their content to users to it subscribe using an RSS reader, such as the Web-based Bloglines.com reader pictured here. Other popular RSS readers include:

NewsGator
FireFox Live Bookmarks
SafariRSS
SharpReader
While most readers are Web-based, a few, like SharpReader, are downloadable client apps, most are free. Also, FeedBurner offers services that can help you track and understand your RSS traffic.

Your My Yahoo! page has a built-in RSS reader, and the new Yahoo! Mail beta also acts as an RSS reader.  You can add an RSS feed from any website displaying the Add to My Yahoo! button, which looks like this:

While your ads will not show up in your users’ My Yahoo! pages, they will see them in the Yahoo! Mail beta RSS reader. The reason for this is that at present My Yahoo! is considered more of a traffic driver; people who subscribe to your feeds will be able to see your ads once they have clicked over to your site from their My Yahoo! pages. 

You can also put an Add to My Yahoo! button on your site to syndicate your content out to My Yahoo! users. It’s free and only takes a few minutes to set up.

If you frequently add content to your site, you should definitely look into creating an RSS feed, and using Yahoo! Ads in RSS to earn extra revenue. If you’re in our network, you have access to Ads in RSS tools, when logged into your account, under the Ad Setup tab. 

Getting started with RSS is pretty straightforward, although it is a wee bit trickier than setting up our Web-based Content Match product. As with the Content Match ads on your website, Yahoo! Ads in RSS are compatible with both Moveable Type and WordPress publishing platforms. Also, like Content Match ads, you install Ads in RSS by cutting and pasting code we provide into your website.

For instructions, consult our handy RSS Setup Guide. (Sorry, but only current publishers registered with Yahoo! Publisher Network can view the RSS Setup Guide.)

— Michael Mattis, Blog Editor
 

A Little Downtime for the Portal: 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. PST TONIGHT, Thursday, April 13

Okay, so the secure publisher portal is going to be down this evening for a few hours for scheduled maintenance, between 7:00 and 9:00 Pacific Standard Time. Don’t panic. This update will not impact your account or the serving of ads on your site.

 Sorry for any inconvenience!

 Ciao,

—The Management