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

How to get approved on Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange

Yahoo! has a lot of different ways to work with our publishers. One of these, Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange (DMX), is a free web application that allows publishers to auction their ad inventory. 

In a new Right Media blog post, new Right Media blogger Kelly Kitchel posts an interview with, um, Kelly Kitchel about getting approved for DMX. Given that you might want to use DMX—and that some of the concepts of approval are useful in general—here’s an excerpt:

“So imagine that you’ve just created a smoking hot website. The next thing you could do is submit your new website to different advertising partners to be part of their programs. Then you can generate some revenue from your hard-earned, organically grown traffic.

“But then the reality of the approval process sets in. Sometimes you’re accepted. Sometimes you wait forever—and then get accepted. And sometimes you’re just outright denied. How do you make it easier on yourself (and the approvers)?”

Well, for starters, a big DMX guideline is “Be clean and professional in design with quality content.” That means make sure your content doesn’t make any copyright violations and that it’s not also a messy page with too many ads and no original content.

For more, you can read the full piece.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Steps to help you avoid hiccups in the payment process

One of the most universal questions—after “Are these dishes clean or dirty?”—has to be, “When am I going to get paid?” Well, no need to fret here at the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Here are a few administrative items to keep in mind to help avoid any hiccups in the payment process.

Payment methods

As we noted in a previous blog article, the Yahoo! Publisher Network has three methods of payment available to our publishers: check, direct deposit or PayPal.  Once the method of payment is verified, you can expect to see payments no later than the last day of each month. 

Please note that if you’ve opted to receive payment by check, you should allow approximately seven to 10 business days for mail delivery. If you selected the PayPal payment option, remember that the name on the PayPal account should match the name on the YPN account for purposes of verification.  If they don’t match, the payment would go out by check or other methods you’ve previously selected.

Revenue accrual 

Revenue accrues over the course of the calendar month. Payments for the previous month’s revenue are issued no later than the last day of the following calendar month.  For example, revenue earned in May 2008 will be paid to active publishers no later than June 30, 2008. Revenue will first be transferred to your account balance prior to the payment being issued. If your account balance is at least $100 ($50 for PayPal), payments are issued within one to three business days.  

Lock down period on information changes 

In order to disperse payments before the end of each month, we lock down certain information from change.  From the 19th to the 24th of every month the Yahoo! Publisher Network portal is locked down and no changes are permitted to the account, payment, or tax information sections.   Keep in mind that many changes require a verification process that may take 10-15 business days for verification before changes go into effect.

If you change your method of payment, for example, from check to direct deposit, our process will require that we validate the bank account information.  If the request for the change has not been completed before the lock-down period, payment will be made via the method that was previously verified.  In this example, the payment would go out by check until the following month, when it would go out by direct deposit.

So make your changes on time to make sure you get paid the way you want to get paid.

–The Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Solutions Team

Enter the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! Publishing Contest

As if monetizing your PDFs weren’t enough, Yahoo! and Adobe are giving you another great reason to participate in the Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo! beta: great prizes.

The prizes are for a contest—our attempt to find the best publishers of ad-enabled PDFs out there. To enter, just sign up for the beta and start publishing your ad-enabled PDFs.  The winner will be determined by a combination of success metrics, such as the number of PDFs published, revenue, impressions, and other ingredients in the “secret sauce” we use in the beta. 

Did we mention the great prizes?  For the grand prize winner, we are offering the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, which helps you to design across media—print, web, interactive, mobile, video, and film—in the most comprehensive, creative environment ever produced.  The grand prize is valued at $2499.  In addition, all publishers who participate will be entered into a raffle for $100 Yahoo! Search Advertising dollars, a great way to start publicizing your PDFs and increase your audience. 

To enter, click over to the sign up page and send us your Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo! beta application.  To see the official contest rules, click here. 

–Mike McCullough

A Publisher Corral of Blogosphere Tips

You might already know that you can create some cool desktop applications with Yahoo! Widgets SDK. Well, the Yahoo! Flash Blog recently announced that these applications can now be built in Flash.

How many times have you published a blog article and then remembered you forgot something important to put into the entry? On her blog, Jennifer Slegg just published a helpful blogger’s pre- publishing checklist. Jen’s list includes practical and sometimes overlooked tips, such as spellchecking, making sure your links work, and sourcing your sources. I have a similar list before I leave the house, which I check exactly three times.

If you’re also a podcast publisher, Marketing Vox posted an article with ten tips for launching a solid podcast. Pointers include planning your podcast schedule, making it RSS-accessible and keeping it short.

So there you go, folks. Hope these blog posts help make your site more compelling.

— Roger Park, Marketing Communications Manager and blog corral captain