Tweet your fave raves for the past year with Yahoo!

By all accounts, 2009 was pretty rough year: economic meltdowns, persistent war, piracy on the high seas, fires and floods. You name it, we endured it.

But not all the news was bad. This year saw airline Captain “Sully” Sullenberger save the lives of 155 people by successfully ditching hos plane in the Hudson; a new world land speed record for a steam-powered car; America’s first commercial Zeppelin—yeah, you heard that right: Zeppelin—service took off into the wild blue yonder over the San Francisco Bay Area; NASA enjoyed a flawless Space Shuttle record and discovered water on the moon; the Large Hadron Collider set a world record in accelerating protons to near light speed and, here at Yahoo!, we announced a dazzling new brand relaunch that promises to be a boon for both our users and advertisers.

Yahoo!’s been crunching the Year in Review numbers since 2001. What we discovered in 2009 is that people all over are coping—and escaping, dealing with the big-footprint issues of the day while seeking comfort in what was good.

This year, you can share your own experience in 140 characters or fewer by Tweeting it on Yahoo’s 2009 Year in Review site, or view the 2009 Rewind video.

—The Team

…and other tidbits  from the blogosphere

I really wanted to start off this roundup with a clip from the recent visit of Food Network’s “Dinner: Impossible” to Yahoo!, but it doesn’t exist yet in video form on the Web—which, in my mind, is the same as not existing at all. So you’ll have to settle for reruns and wondering what a salmon cupcake really tastes like. Oh, and these publisher-focused morsels…

Mmm…Delicious
The Yahoo! Search blog digs into new features for Search BOSS, our search platform that lets you customize Yahoo! Search for your content pages. In particular, they like BOSS’s integration with Delicious social bookmarks to help deliver even more relevant results.Over on the Developer Network blog, they show you how to build a module that uses your page content to generate a list of Yahoo! results, re-ranked by their popularity on Delicious. I don’t pretend to understand that code-y stuff there. But I hope that you do, because if used properly, it could help you generate more relevant content to go with the content that your readers are already reading.

Social media sucks
If you ask one of my less-social colleagues, the reason why social media “sucks” is because it’s a “waste of time.” (And here I thought that was the point.) But Josh Bernoff writes on Forrester Research’s Groundswell blog that social media disappoints advertisers because they’re treating it like, well, media. “Media is something you can advertise in, in most cases. While you can advertise in social networks, that is the least interesting use for them,” he says. When businesses start treating social networks as something other than media, they can start to capitalize on them.

…but you’re still using it
Speaking of social—um, whatever you want to call it: Marketing Vox reports on a Harris Interactive poll, saying that “over half of Americans (51%) do not use Twitter or participate in either of the two largest social networking sites—MySpace and Facebook.” That seems like a curious spin. Doesn’t that also mean that pretty much half of Americans are on those sites? The poll also says that, despite the hype, just 5% of Americans are using Twitter.

Wait…those were flops?
The folks who run the human-powered directory that gave Yahoo! its start (and is still going strong) pull together interesting tidbits throughout the week. I loved their piece on products that didn’t quite take off. But then again, I loved Crystal Pepsi.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Giving power to the Purple—our colleagues have churned out some cool stuff lately

Everyone should be allowed to toot their own horns once in a while. For us this is especially true, if those sounds represent products and services that could help, or be of interest to, our publishers.

In recent weeks, some of our fellow Yahoos have taken the lid off of several exciting projects, and we thought we’d share the good news…

Thanking the monkey
The Yahoo! Developer Network just introduced an enhancement to SearchMonkey, our open search platform. The new feature, as described here in the Yahoo! Search blog, enables site owners and developers to embed flash video, games and documents directly into Yahoo! Search results. Publishers can just add a few lines of code to their embedded item, the Yahoo! webcrawler will pick it up, and your listings in Yahoo! SERPs will go bananas with eye-catching images.

The best of the Web, made for TV
You might think that accessing the Internet via a television screen has been tried and failed—and you’d be right. But this is something different: Yahoo!’s TV Widgets is now being built into sets from manufacturers like Samsung and others, enabling users to interact with their favorite Web services while they watch TV. We believe that this intelligent integration is what was lacking from previous attempts at marrying television and the Web. TV Widgets picked up several “Best of CES” awards in January—tune into the details here.

New Demo Targeting and Dayparting
If you do any type of pay-per-click advertising, this is going to be welcome news: Yahoo! Search Marketing just introduced several major enhancements to our Sponsored Search product, including ad scheduling, a dayparting tool for setting the display of ads at different times and days across an entire week; and bid adjustments, which lets you specify a premium bid amount for desired demographic groups and audiences. Take a short hop over to the YSM blog for more details.

Another print newspaper bites the dust
Finally, because there’s still some news outside of Yahoo!, here’s one non-purple item: An interesting article on the continuing struggles of the print media industry. Almost daily, large traditional print publishers are moving resources to their online operations. For Web publishers, does this engender a bit of smugness and pride that you were here first; or cause fear, as you may be faced with a higher level of competition from deep-pocketed corporations?

Yahoo! is helping newspapers make this transition through our APT product serving the Newspaper Consortium, but the continuing exodus of printed papers begs another question: With what will future generations line bird cages and wrap fish?

— Jeff Hecox

Newspaper Consortium members seeing sales results from partnership 

We mentioned last week that some of our Newspaper Consortium members were seeing early success. The New York Times has a story this week that looks more deeply at the Newspaper Consortium and the effect it’s having on traditional newspaper sales forces. The article says that newspapers are finding the partnership with Yahoo! one of the bright spots in a tough advertising market.

The article talks about how newspapers can pitch local businesses “that let them reach visitors to the newspapers’ Web sites and Yahoo! users in the area,” and also use Yahoo! technology such as APT. The results so far include:

[A] sales blitz at The Ventura County Star, a small daily north of Los Angeles, netted nearly $1 million in sales in the run-up to Christmas, or roughly 40 percent of what the paper sold in online ads in 2008. The Naples Daily News in Florida did even better: The late-January blitz generated $2 million in sales, or more than half what the paper sold online in 2008. Some larger newspapers have had similar successes.

“If we could do just shy of $1 million in two weeks in a horrible economy, what does it mean for us when the economy turns?” asked George H. Cogswell III, publisher of The Ventura County Star.

Visit apt.yahoo.com for more about the Newspaper Consortium and APT.

— The Team

Publisher news of interest as we march into March

Ready for spring? Us, too. Here are a few random items that have poked through the topsoil and warmed our winter-weary brains:

Yahoo! Buzz turns one
At the party celebrating my first birthday, I wowed attendees by taking my first steps. Our social content site Buzz recently celebrated its first birthday, but it hit the ground running from Day One. Brian McMullin, a Product Lead for Buzz, discusses the year’s highlights in a post on our corporate blog Yodel Anecdotal. If you haven’t buzzed on over to the hive to see how we sting the competition with the ability for any publisher to add content, now’s your chance.

Finding the missing links
Inbound link-building may not be the Holy Grail of online publishing, but it’s pretty close. In this informative article on Search Engine Watch, Carrie Hill provides several useful strategies for increasing the number of links that point toward your site. More importantly perhaps, she also cautions against link-building tactics that will decrease the quality of traffic and make your efforts look spammy. Carrie obviously knows what’s she’s doing, because we’ve now linked to her article twice in one paragraph.

Offline publishing: The beginning of the end?
Nearly every day I see or hear a reference to Amazon’s Kindle device, and it seems one newspaper after the next is folding or laying off employees. That puts online publishers in the driver’s seat, a view supported by this article on InternetNews.com, which describes the Hearst Corp.’s plans to introduce a digital reading device of its own. I guess I’m still a relative Luddite in this area, because I have yet to see a Kindle in person, and the last book I bought was a paper-and-ink version of a 50-year-old tome that has curiously risen up Amazon’s bestseller list in the last eight weeks.

Deep in the heart
Webmaster World’s PubCon show makes its first-ever visit to Texas next week, highlighted by a keynote speech from one of the seeds of the Apple Macintosh, Guy Kawasaki. The Austin event, scheduled for March 11-13, also features a wide variety of breakout sessions and other opportunities for brain-picking and hob-nobbing with your publishing peers. Register by the end of the day today for a $100 discount.

— Jeff Hecox

A.H. Belo makes $1.2 Million from 2008 behavioral targeting tests

You may recall that when we announced our APT advertising platform last year, we said that the first customers to use it were members of our Newspaper Consortium. Well, the Newspaper Consortium is now seeing early successes.  For example, A. H. Belo, the first holding company to have all of its papers on APT, said in its recent earnings call that its partnership with Yahoo! has been one of its financial bright spots.

CEO Robert Decherd didn’t give revenue projections for APT, but said A. H. Belo had made $1.2 million last year beta testing Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting and saw auto ad revenues rise for the Dallas Morning News. In his words:

 ”You’re going to have three newspapers using this tool on our sites, but I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the $1.2 million is the most we expect to realize out of this deal. That was mostly one paper and was a test. We’ve now got APT at all our papers and we’ve got the ability, thanks to Yahoo, to sell behaviorally targeted ads on our own sites. This will make a significant difference for us this year.”

For more information about APT, visit apt.yahoo.com.

— The Team

…and other tales from the blogosphere

Ever feel like you’ve missed an opportunity? If you’re a blogger, you don’t want to miss out on capitalizing on a popular blog post, as Jennifer Slegg points out in her excellent post, Springboard off of a successful blog entry. Her advice boils down to a couple of main points:

• They liked your post? Write more like it. (It’s so simple, when you think about it.)
• Find a reason to link to the people who linked to your post, both as a way to repay their generosity and to establish a relationship that can get you added to their blogroll.

For advice on making social media marketing work for you, we looked at Lee Odden’s interview of Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day. Despite the seemingly freewheeling nature of social media, Evans says that it’s important to measure social media campaigns—and, because it’s digital, that it’s not that hard to do.

We’re all about the books this week. Dave Bollier, editor of onthecommons.org, has written Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, which details the rise of open-source software and Creative Commons licenses. “Viral spiral” is the term Bollier uses to describe “the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools.” We like that Bollier practices what he preaches. You can buy a hard copy of his work, or you can download it for free.

Our colleagues at Flickr are embarking on their own social experiment, and they’d like you to take part. To celebrate the launch last year of Flickr video—and the Flickrverse in general—they’re about to launch the Flickr Clock, which will display video taken every hour of the day. “As more members participate, we’ll have the opportunity to experience what a moment in time looks like from a diversity of perspectives,” they say. You can upload your own video to the Flickr Clock Group, and tag it with the time that it was shot.

Finally, have you wondered if the celebrities posting questions in Yahoo! Answers were real, and not, say, Halibut21 under a different guise? The Answers blog says you can tell by their “official” badge under their icon, which they can only get if they’re the real deal. I don’t have my official badge yet, so you’re just going to have to take my word that I’m real. 

  — Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

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

Five reasons your revenue could be fluctuating

The famous Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”

While he couldn’t fathom the realities of today’s Internet society, he still had the right idea — “hard work will pay off” — and with Yahoo! Publisher Network, the same holds true.

Our publishers often ask why their revenue is fluctuating. Many times, upon investigating, we find that the publishers themselves have made a slight change to their websites, or they’ve modified their marketing techniques. Either of these can cause revenue amounts to change.

To help you have success with your Yahoo! Publisher Network account, we put together five of the most common factors that may impact your revenue.

Pricing discounts for traffic quality 
Publishers should strive to host content that is unique and updated frequently. Good content will help drive repeat users back to your site, and with pricing discounts in place for our Sponsored Search advertisers, publishers could potentially see differences in their revenue when their quality varies. Clicks from low-quality traffic sources may be discounted to ensure that advertisers are paying an appropriate amount based on the value of the click.

The categories you target 
While we advise publishers to target specific ad categories for their sites, we generally recommend they select categories that are relevant to the content of their sites. For example, a website about popular vacation spots would probably not display ads about computer software. There may be instances where you may want to run different types of ads — a golf site, for example, might want ads for non-golf items that its readers might buy. But in general, ads that aren’t relevant to the site may result in a decrease in revenue.

The quality of your website 
Remember that the quality of a website plays a big role in generating revenue — you want your site to be a place where users trust your content and are comfortable clicking on the links. We encourage publishers to place their ads on content-rich pages that are well structured and provide for a good user experience.

Where your site is advertised 
One the most important factors affecting publisher revenue is where your site is linked to across the Internet. Listings in search engine results and Sponsored Search ads are widely used to market websites and drive traffic.

But these two methods alone do not guarantee results. For example, search engines constantly change their algorithms and as their search results are constantly changing, as well. A site displayed on the first page of results of a major search engine could suddenly drop in position, and traffic would drop right along with it. It’s vital to frequently monitor your weblogs or use third-party software to identify where the traffic to your site is coming from.

The subject and the season 
This is one of the most overlooked causes for any sort of revenue/impression drops or increases for an account. We often forget that searches and clicks are a direct reflection of what is happening in our society and on the calendar

For example, we received an inquiry from one of our publishers who received a good amount of traffic and clicks in May and June, but suddenly experienced a drastic drop in both impressions and clicks in July. We researched the account and did not find any underlying reasons for this sudden drop, but reviewed his website and discovered that it primarily focused on computers.

The increase in traffic was attributed to graduation season. During May and June, computer sales often rise in conjunction with college and high school graduation ceremonies, hence the increase in people searching for computers to give to graduating students. The mystery of the traffic fluctuation had been solved.

If these five factors don’t explain changes in your revenue, contact your customer service team.

— The Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Solutions Team

Selected publisher-related tidbits from the blogosphere

Are you a publisher who is constantly looking for the right image to post on your site? Well, we may not know what the best image is, but we can steer you to some free ones. The folks on the Flickr blog recently announced that Flickr is teaming up with Getty Images to create a collection of royalty-free, rights-ready and rights-managed photographs.

“Team Flickr has long wanted to create a way to make it easier for those who use photos as a part of their daily business to do so in a way that respects the talent and rights of our members,” say our Flickr colleagues on their blog. They also created helpful FAQs about the royalty-free collection and how to use it.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Publishers
Rebecca Sullivan on the RightMedia Blog recently posted some tips for effective publishing. “I have helped publishers from dozens of countries, with very different backgrounds, and with very different sites, and I’ve learned one thing: they’re not that different after all,” Sullivan writes. “There are some behaviors that are shared by many of our most successful publishers, so I’d like to present you with some of their best ideas, so you can use them and maybe even make lots of money.”

Mapping Your Peeps
The Groups Labs team recently launched the People Map Beta. If you’re a Yahoo! Group owner or a moderator, you can map members of your particular group.  They just have to complete a short information form that puts them on the map. You already know where they are in terms of common interests, but now you can see where they are physically.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications