Yahoo! Contest Winners go to that Great Power Lunch in the Sky

You voted in the Yahoo! Ultimate Connection contest and three Yahoo! small business owners yesterday enjoyed a power lunch in the sky and a meeting with entrepreneur Ivanka Trump.

Crooked house builder, Glen Halliday, faerie lady, Melissa Balland, and type-o-phile, Mike Willner, also each got a $25,000 search marketing budget as well as other prizes. For more, check out our post on Yodel Anecdotal along with coverage here and here.

See their stories at the Ultimate Connection web site.

 Congrats to Melissa, Mike and Glen!

—The Team

Introducing Quality-Based Pricing

Web publishing is a circular business. You produce a carefully crafted resource that’s useful and entertaining to your users. You offer contextual ads from a trusted source—that’s us—that strengthen your brand and message and, hopefully, bring you revenue from qualified clicks, which in turn can benefit the advertiser. That’s the formula, and we’ve always thought it a fair one.

In short, we like to think that we provide quality, for you as a publisher, for our advertisers and for the user. It’s a big circle of value. The circle can get warped, however, when users click on ads that don’t meet their needs, which can lead to poor conversions for advertisers.

In our ongoing effort to strengthen our network, we’re introducing a new traffic quality feature called “quality-based pricing.” Under quality-based pricing, the traffic you drive to the advertiser will be priced commensurate with the value that advertisers receive.

It’s an important step that reinforces our overall commitment to deliver long-term success for our publishers, a high-quality experience for users, and high-value traffic to our advertisers.

This may have an impact on your business. When you provide quality traffic to our advertisers, this in turn may lead to better click revenue for you. Conversely, driving poor quality traffic to our advertisers may lead to reduced revenue.

—The Team

Yahoo’s Ultimate Connection Contest is now closed to entries. The deadline to submit essays passed at 11:59 Pacific Time, last night, May 30. The essays are being read and the five finalists will be announced in June. Voting is set to begin June 14.

Good luck to all our participants!

—The Team

PayPal option offers publishers flexibility and a lower payment threshold

Before we get started, let’s do “full disclosure.” A long, long time ago, back when the Web was just a toddler and I was a shave-tail assistant editor at a new magazine called Business 2.0, there was any number of Internet funny-money schemes out there, all trying to get covered in the press.

I ignored most of them.

Then the boys from PayPal rang up. I knew right away that PayPal was something different, but I was still skeptical. So instead of a feature story, I wrote a little blurb for the front of the magazine. PayPal, of course, has become one of the Web’s great success stories. In fact, I use it all the time.

PayPal for Our Publisher Pals
Today at Yahoo! Publisher Network we’re pleased, and I mean pleased, to announce that publishers in our network now have the option to be paid via PayPal, rather than by check or by electronic funds transfer.

In addition to the greater flexibility and convenience offered by PayPal, publishers who opt in will enjoy a reduced payment threshold, from $100 to just $50.

For more information, please read our FAQs. To sign up for PayPal, log in to your account.

Not only should I have written that PayPal feature story, I should have invested. Ouch.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

We launched the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta in August of 2005 with the goal of helping online publishers of every size to grow and prosper.  We have learned a lot from you in this time, and hopefully you’ve benefited by working with us. 

Today, we are thrilled to announce that we have taken the first step towards the next chapter in Yahoo!’s services for publishers: Yahoo! has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Right Media Inc.

Yes, after six months of testing the waters with Right Media as both a strategic investor and a participant in the Right Media Exchange, we are jumping in with both feet! Right Media will help us to extend our Yahoo! Publisher Network while also enhancing our efforts to build a self-serve display advertising system. Right Media currently has a self-service publisher product called Direct Media Exchange that enables publishers to sign up for, manage, and optimize against multiple advertising networks in one convenient interface. They offer a set of ad network partners for you to join and you can add your own ad network partnerships into the optimization mix as well if you like. 

We’re extremely excited about what Right Media offers to the publishing world; we think that it epitomizes the “right” way to help you as a publisher to get the most out of your site. The Right Media tools provide many of the things you have been telling us are important to you: control, openness and transparency. Check out our Yodel blog to hear more details.

Stay tuned for further changes and announcements over the coming months as we work to complete the Right Media acquisition and then, once the acquisition is complete, begin to integrate Right Media into Yahoo!’s publisher offerings and move forward with other exciting developments.  We think that this is the start of something really great. We hope that you do too.

Keep on publishin’.

—Cody Simms, Senior Product Manager

Publisher Account Interface to undergo scheduled enhancements, April 9, from 6:00 p.m. to approximately  9:00 p.m, Pacific Time

The smart folks in the propeller beanies will be doing a few minor enhancements and tweaks to your secure account interface on Monday, April 9, from 6:00 p.m. until about 9:00 p.m., Pacific Time. For the duration of this maintenance your account will be unavailable. We’ll tell you and little more about these small changes once they have been put in place.

This minor bit of monkey business should not impact your account earnings or the serving of ads to your site.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Propeller-beanie Team

New VP to help ensure that all of our constituents benefit from a focus on marketplace quality

The term “quality” can be quite subjective until it is related to something very specific. It may take a tailor to tell the difference between good-quality stitching and high-quality stitching. Likewise, it might take an oenophile or even a sommelier to tell the difference between a good claret and a really great one.

As a publisher using contextual advertising networks, you know when you’re displaying quality ads—ads that are contextual to your content and appealing to your users (i.e., ads that are highly clickable). Advertisers, too, know quality. They see it as highly qualified clicks by users likely to become customers.

And the users? They know a little about quality, as well. They know what they want: content, products and services that meet their needs, wrapped into an engaging, trusted experience. That’s why Yahoo! is committed to encouraging quality all across our network, for everyone.

In fact, Yahoo!’s click-through protection system proactively identifies and does not bill advertisers for between 12 and 15 percent of clicks on average. This includes not only click fraud, but also other types of clicks that Yahoo! believes should not be billed to advertisers.

We’re Panamaniacs
As you no doubt know from the blogosphere buzz, Yahoo! Search Marketing recently launched its new search advertising system, sometimes called “Project Panama.” This new system gives advertisers considerably more visibility into their ads’ quality and more control than before. As new “Project Panama” features roll out, advertisers will be provided with even more visibility and control. One of the new features is quality-based pricing, which will help ensure that traffic is priced consistently with the quality it delivers.

But we also haven’t forgotten our publishers. Over the coming weeks and months, as these features come online, we’ll be offering helpful hints and tips on the blog that will better enable you to work with the system’s new capabilities.

A Man, a Plan…
Lastly, we’re pleased to announce the appointment of a new vice president of Marketplace Quality. The new VP, Reggie Davis, will be 100 percent dedicated to ensuring quality for all of Yahoo’s advertisers, publishers and end users. Reggie will drive all of our quality efforts, hiring a dedicated staff that will coordinate quality teams across the organization.

Welcome aboard, Reggie.

Learn more about our efforts to build a quality network and how you, the publisher, fit in:
Quality Standards
Getting Better All the Time
Tips from YahooSarah
And Another Thing
Maintaining a Quality Network

—Michael Mattis, Quality Blog Editor

Intermittent service between 8:00 p.m. PST March 2 through 2:00 a.m. March 3

We will be updating our system beginning at 8:00 p.m. PST on Friday, March 2, through 2:00 a.m. on Saturday. During this time, reporting and login may be intermittently unavailable. This maintenance will not affect the ads on your site.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team

Please note Program Policies changes

Longtime blog readers will know already that we’re pretty picky when it comes to maintaining a quality network, even though we’re still in beta. It’s kind of an obsession, one you can read about here and here.

We’ve always maintained that artfully interweaving our ads with your original, relevant, entertaining content is a common sense best-practice. This helps ensure quality leads to our advertisers while helping you maintain your publishing credibility. Over the long term, enhanced credibility with users may lead to a wider audience and more frequent return visitors.

To encourage this best practice we have updated our Program Policies, which now require that no more than three ad units appear on a single page at one time.

Thanks for helping keep Yahoo! Publisher Network a high quality experience for everyone.

—The Management

Publisher Account Interface to experience scheduled maintenance February 2, from 5:00 p.m. to approximately  9:00 p.m, Pacific Time

On Friday, February 2  from 5:00 p.m. until about 9:00 p.m.., Pacific Time, we’ll be doing a little scheduled maintenance on the secure account interface. For the duration of this maintenance your account will be unavailable.
 

This will not impact your account earnings nor the serving of ads to your site.
 

We apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team