You and your users should see fewer duplicate ads starting today

The word “dupe” has some interesting connotations. One the one hand it can mean a person who is “easily deceived or fooled,” and on the other it is simply shorthand for “duplicate”—in broadcast lingo, a copy of a videotape used to be called a dupe.

In our world, a dupe is simply an ad that appears more than once on the same page with more than one ad unit. Some of you have told us that dupes are a minor annoyance to both you and your users. They do little to enhance your site’s experience or entice users to click. (That’s not to say that a user would have to be a dupe to click on a dupe, but still… )

Fewer “dupes,” more “uniques”
In response to your concerns, we recently did some fine tuning. Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of an enhancement that should improve the number of unique ads shown on pages with more than one ad unit. This enhancement applies to all types of ads, but impacts only our self-service publishers (i.e., most of you).

If the live enhancement follows our research model, we anticipate that, in the long run, publishers may be rewarded with higher click-through-rates (CTR).

Here’s to being unique!

—Amit Paunikar, Senior Product Manager

This social media service will be a boon to publishers

As announced this morning, MyBlogLog has officially joined the Yahoo! family.  As an early user and proponent, I’m personally very excited about this, but more importantly I’m here to report that it’s another terrific tool we can offer to help publishers analyze, understand, and maybe even increase their traffic.

MyBlogLog’s signature Reader Roll’s functionality is easy to grasp, but its implications to publishers are powerful: This distributed community widget turns passive readers into mini-publishers and connects publishers to each other via readers-in-common. In this way, the Reader Roll deepens the publisher/reader relationship—and transforms the entire web into a distributed social network.

Is that all, you ask? Nope, there’s more! MyBlogLog also offers full-fledged publisher analytics, which combine with its community features to create a unique and powerful way for publishers (be they large media companies, serious webmasters, or hobbyists) to learn about their readers. We’re not just talking about page-view counts and referral URLs here, but names, faces and personalities, too.

How it works is very simple. Check out this Reader Roll mock-up (or the live one in the right-hand column):

It’s the last five readers of this blog who are already registered with MyBlogLog. You’ll find similar lists on YPN friends Read/Write Web, TechCrunch, and AVC, along with thousands of other sites, blogs, and personal pages across the web.

If you click on the user photos, you’ll see a profile page that includes any websites the users claim as publishers (each of which has its own MyBlogLog page), join their contact networks or the community networks for any of their sites, leave them a message, and see what links are “hot” among their readership. You can also see any sites for which they’ve joined the reader community, information that the users have elected to share (such as their Yahoo! IM handles, Flickr usernames, and the like).

Once you sign up as a publisher, you get access to all the same kinds of information about your readers, plus detailed “eyes-only” web analytics stats in a really easy-to-use format. You can even expose some of that information to your readers, if you like. Note also that there’s a leverage effect to the network, because your readers, by interacting with each other, deepen their affinity as your audience—and because you can get information and insight not only on your readers’ activities on your site, but, in aggregate, off your site as well (for example, articles popular among your readers). You may even find that you get new traffic from visitors of other sites that you read or are similar to yours—my MyBlogLog community page has been among the largest sources of traffic to my own blog since I joined. 

Thus MyBlogLog helps us offer another set of innovative social media tools to publishers. Over the longer term, the terrific team that built it will continue to expand upon the explosion of publisher-enabling technologies that can help you drive revenue, grow traffic, and build cool experiences… but we’ll leave the details up to speculation for now .

In the meantime, congratulations to Eric, Todd, Scott, and the rest of the talented MyBlogLog team.  Please welcome them to the Yahoo! publisher community and give their services a whirl!

—Greg Cohn Senior Manager, Market Segments

Customer Solutions closed on New Year’s Day

Just a reminder, Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Customer Solutions department will be closed on New Year’s Day, Jan. 1, 2007. We encourage you to manage your account online that day, or submit a support request and we’ll respond as quickly as possible after we reopen on January 2.

Happy New Year!

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Phone support closed Christmas and New Year’s Days

It’s time to celebrate. So in observance of the upcoming holidays, Yahoo! Publisher Network’s customer support department will be closed on Monday, Dec. 25 and Monday, Jan. 1.

Please enjoy yourselves and stay safe.

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Phone support closed Thursday and Friday

Everybody needs something to be thankful for. You know: life, liberty and the pursuit of higher PPC. A day or two off with the family once in awhile is something to be thankful for, too. 

With that in mind, our Customer Support telephones will be offline on Thursday and Friday, November 23 and 24. We will be open on Saturday from 7:00 .a.m. to 4:00 p.m. for phone support, and again on Monday the 27th at our usual business hours. If you have any issues during our downtime, feel free to send us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Cheers, and enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday.

—Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Support

Teaming up to make search submission easier
 

As a publisher, you know how important it is to get your site crawled by search engines—more crawling equals more visitors which could equal more qualified clicks on your ads. Would you like it if, say, it would be a lot easier for you to provide search engines—and not just ours, mind you—with your content and metadata? Would you like it if there were a single, uniform format for search submissions to search providers? It’s kind of rhetorical question. Many of you have, in fact, told us you want just that.

Which is why Yahoo! Search, along with our friends at Google and Microsoft, is pleased to announce support of Sitemaps 0.90, a common protocol that will make it easier for you to get your pages seen across the Web. To facilitate that, we’re announcing, again in collaboration with our friends from across the aisle, Sitemaps.org. This new site provides details of the current release of the new Sitemaps 0.90 protocol and will include future updates as we continue to collaborate. With the common protocol, you can use a single format to create a catalog of your URLs and to notify major search providers of changes.

For all the details on how to submit your sitemap under the new standard protocol, visit the Yahoo! Search Blog. As always, we love to hear feedback, so visit our Yahoo! Site Explorer forum.

—The Yahoo! Search and Yahoo! Publisher Network teams

Promoting quality on a granular level

Building a high-quality network is a top priority at Yahoo! Publisher Network. We’ve offered a plethora of blog posts to help you, the publisher, understand just what that means (like this one, this one, and this one). Ensuring compliance with terms and conditions, especially with regard to ad implementation and content, is a big part how we maintain that quality

With that in mind, we’re happy to unveil a new feature called Compliance Manager. This feature helps you pinpoint problems with the implementation of your Yahoo! ads, or problems with content on the same page as your Yahoo! ads, so that you can correct them—and keep the ads flowing. 

Here’s how it works: If a compliance issue is detected on one of your URLs, you will be notified via email and through an alert in your secure account interface. These will direct you to your new Compliance Manager control panel. The Compliance Manager will inform you of what the issue is so that you have the opportunity to fix it. Once you’ve addressed the issue, you can then go back to the Compliance Manager to submit the remedied URL. We’ll get back to you with a status report, usually within seven business days. 

—Eric Edge, Yahoo! Publisher Network Product Manager

The bad news first
You will not be able to access the Publisher account interface this evening, November 16, 2006, from 6:00 p.m. to approximately midnight, Pacific Time. This should not impact your account earnings, nor the serving of ads to your site.

The silver lining…
We’re pulling the Publisher Center down for those few hours because our gearheads are installing some pretty whiz-bang stuff that should help improve the quality of the network. We’ll tell you about it as soon as it’s done. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, we apologize for any inconvenience.

—The Team

Yahoo! Search Marketing launches a blog of its own

Last week we announced Yahoo! Search Marketing’s new search advertising platform. This enhanced platform offers advertisers more features and control, in a more intuitive interface, helping lead to higher quality ads. It’s very cool.

To help advertisers take advantage of these enhancements, we’ve launched the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog. It’s the first blog dedicated to the new platform. If you’re a serious publisher, you’ll want to keep up on all the latest from Yahoo! Search Marketing via the blog.

The new Yahoo! Search Marketing blog will:  

• Include contributions from our executives and managers working on all the new products and features, from geo-targeting and analytics to customer service
• Respond to user community feedback
• Feature guest posts from online advertising industry insiders
• Report on industry events
• Offer tips and tricks to help advertisers learn how to optimize their search marketing campaigns and help improve the quality of the ads you see on your site

And that’s just for starters. In case haven’t already had enough of my golden prose, I’ll be penning the occasional post there myself. Be sure to bookmark the URL—http://www.ysmblog.com—or add it to your RSS reader.

To hear more about the new platform, listen to Jen Slegg’s interview with Steve Mitgang, Yahoo! Search Marketing’s Vice President and General Manager on WebmasterRadio.fm.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

We’ve put all your publisher services under one click

Yahoo! offers a cornucopia of publisher-related services and content, from domains and hosting services to content badges and APIs for you to mash up in original ways. Now we’ve put them in one place, accessible to you whether you are in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program or not.

At the new Yahoo! Publisher Network home page you’ll find all you need to help:

• Drive traffic—Syndication, feed submission, pod- and video-casting, and search marketing tools and products
• Enhance your site—Yahoo! content, including easy-to-implement search tools, badges, APIs and Creative Commons open content
• Build a new site or re-establish an existing one—Domain registration, custom email, web hosting and design, and online merchant solutions

In addition, the new home page includes headline feeds directly from the blog, and a sleek new look.

It’s all on the new Yahoo! Publisher Network home page. Check it out »

—The Team