Publisher-related news and bits from around the blogosphere

As Halloween approaches, we thought we’d compile some news for our publishers, so you can spend more time working on your Halloween costume.

What do you want from me?
A while ago, Yahoo! bought a company called Inquisitor, which makes a cool Safari browser plug-in of the same name. The Inquisitor application, which helps generate auto-completes on search queries and previews results, is now available for Firefox and IE7 and 8 browsers. It can also help to generate more personalized search results. Check out the Yahoo! Search blog for more information.

Any colour you like
Whether you spell it “colors” or “colours,” you now have more options when using different themes and colors to personalize your My Yahoo! page. You can now unleash the true potential of your inner designer and start customizing your page. Check out more information here on how to make your My Yahoo! page more individualistic.

Hey you
Social networking is all the rage these days, and Yahoo! has recently made some upgrades to its user profile application to reflect this trend. The new “universal profile” is still in beta, but it can help you manage your identity, activities, interests and connections across Yahoo!. “Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections, not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web,” says Jim Stoneham, Vice President, Communities, about the new profile format. “Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we ‘light up’ social experiences at Yahoo!”.

The profile enhancement is further, ahem, profiled here.

Have a safe and sane Halloween holiday!

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Photo of Roger Waters performing “Any Colour You Like” courtesy of Eddie Bearman

Recent enhancements to our Content Match product may help publishers increase revenue

Game show host: “Peter Publisher is so rich!”
Audience: “How rich is he?”
Host: “He’s so rich, he lines his bird cage with [blanks]!”

You know that Richard Dawson would have nailed this one, with the answer “hundred-dollar bills.” We like to make matches that involve money, too. While they may not enable you to become as audacious as Peter Publisher, some recent improvements to the systems that match your content to advertisers’ ads can help you increase monetization of your site.

More specifically, we’ve upgraded the matching technology for our Content Match product, which places Yahoo! ads on your sites. Our ad matching systems are designed to take a balanced approach between ad relevance, advertiser ROI and publisher monetization. They attempt to understand what your content means and the intent of your advertisers’ ads. This makes previously hard-to-monetize content a much more viable option for advertisers, thus potentially leading to more revenue for you.

We invite you to learn more about these changes by reading this post on our Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. While you do that, we’re going to take Gene Rayburn’s cool ’70s stick microphone in for routine maintenance.

— Jeff Hecox

New ads reminds users to give Yahoo! Search a try 

We’ve worked really hard to make Yahoo! Search a better experience, with interesting new features (and interesting names, to boot) in the past year like SearchMonkey and Search BOSS. So, naturally, we want people to know about it.

Tens of millions of users choose Yahoo! Search every day. But, says Raj Gossain, VP of Marketing for Yahoo! Search in a blog post today, “We don’t think that’s enough. So today we’re launching an integrated, nationwide, on- and offline marketing campaign to remind the rest of the world (or at least everyone in the United States) that it’s time to give Yahoo! Search a try.”

The campaign will include radio ads and display ads like the one below.

To hear one of our radio ads, read Raj’s blog post.

– The Team

Selected blogosphere tidbits

Time of the season
As we shift into cooler weather and shorter days, Yodel Anecdotal recently announced that Yahoo! is launching a new calendar. The new web-based application features open standards so you can share your schedule with others, and it’s also built for the mobile platform.

News bits
In the online media landscape, the Associated Press plays an important role in the publishing and news coverage. Often the AP is the first to cover a story, then bloggers pick up on the news piece and run with the story. Publishing 2.0 examines the relationship between the AP and the 21st Century news ecosystem.

Extraordinary ideas
The folks at the Groundswell blog recently published a piece on how ordinary marketers can generate extraordinary ideas. Just because these ideas were written with marketers in mind doesn’t mean that publishers can’t use these tips, too. As the popularity of blogs, social networks and wikis grows, it’s good to learn how to best use these technologies.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

New site gives you information on the Yahoo!-Google deal

It’s a pretty good guess you’ve heard opinions on the Yahoo!-Google marketing agreement from just about everybody: your coworkers, your competitors, your daily blog, and — who knows? — maybe even your taxi driver. Which is why we thought we could help you sift through the clutter to the facts.

This week we launched the Yahoo! Search Agreement site, which will help you find out what you need to know about the commercial arrangement announced by Yahoo! and Google in June. We hope the information archived on this site will help visitors understand why the agreement with Google will make Yahoo! a stronger competitor in online advertising and will benefit advertisers, publishers and end users.

Among the items you’ll find there is a blog post from our President, Sue Decker, that busts some myths about the agreement. For example, Sue writes,

[The agreement is] simply a contract that gives Yahoo! the right, but no obligation, to show Google AdSense ads on Yahoo!’s own network. It’s important to note that the agreement is non-exclusive and gives us the option to “backfill” with Google ads if and when we see fit.

You can also view more details of the deal on the site, as well as frequently asked questions and press coverage. With the facts in hand — unfiltered by your workout buddies — we hope you’ll discover how the arrangement might benefit you.

– The Team