A new poll suggests a holiday boom for small online businesses

 

Holiday shopping can be a drag. Long lines, surly clerks, pushy crowds, miles of walking—at the end of the day, your dogs are beat. Fortunately consumers know what a pain holiday shopping can be and are turning to shopping online as an antidote to aggravation. In fact, according to a recent poll conducted by Yahoo! and Harris Interactive, 76 percent of shoppers polled said they plan to shop for gifts online—some of them while at work.

 

That’s good news for online retailers of all sizes. But what’s even better for many of you self-service publishers is that 75 percent of those polled said that they were likely to purchase gifts online from small businesses. Sixty-three percent said that online specialty, niche or boutique retailers were among the “best places” to shop for hard-to-find gifts.

 

The 3.3 keys to success
The survey showed that three key factors help consumers determine whether they might shop online at small business sites: a secure payment system, easy customer checkout and free shipping. In addition, participants stressed ease of navigation, a simple checkout process and easy registration.

 

Ads vs. e-commerce
Some online retailers may be understandably leery about displaying contextual ads on their pages, fearing that they may drive customers to the competition before a sale has been made. But what about serving up ads after a sale is made and the checkout process is complete—on the Thank You or Confirmation page, for example—or in the event that checkout has been abandoned? Using Ad Blocking and Ad Targeting publishers can help ensure that the ads they show are unlikely to be those of direct competitors, and more likely to be those of businesses complimentary to their own, while still in the interests of their users.

 

To learn more about this survey, visit Yahoo! Media Relations.

 

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

 

“None of us is as smart as all of us.”—Japanese proverb 

 

Nature gravitates towards equilibrium and the online world is no exception to this rule. Just as a search engine gives you organic results on the left hand side of the page, you will also find useful information on the right hand sponsored results.  Both results are important, relevant and getting better everyday and a good user experience balances the two.

 

Attending two conferences over the past few weeks presented two approaches to successful online publishing; one focused on audience and community, the other on commerce and monetization.

 

Meetings of minds
I was at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco to talk with new startups that have drawn significant attention (and traffic) and are trying to figure out how to keep their servers from melting down, desperate to cover their hosting bills. Next, I was at the annual WebmasterWorld gathering in Las Vegas called PubCon, where I listened to site owners sharing tips on how to tune their well-oiled monetization machines but are peering over the wall trying to figure out how to get some of the traffic pounding down the doors on the latest and greatest social network site.

 

There is an opportunity to bring these groups together to learn from each other. As before, balance is important. The most successful sites will balance community and monetization and I hope that the Yahoo! Publisher Network can help make that happen for its members.

 

As one of the largest community destinations on the Web, Yahoo! is home to many communities and most of them have some kind of badge or feed that you can take advantage of and integrate into your site. We’ve listed many of these tools on our Publisher Services tab in your secure publisher interface as well as on the publicly available Enhance Your Site page. As new services come online we will be updating these sections for you.

 

The Yahoo! Publisher Network is unique because it focuses on site owners who are integrating Yahoo! services into their sites. They are not only consuming Yahoo! as regular viewers but are also partnered with us to re-distribute our content and services to their audiences.

 

Tell us what you want
We’ve been thinking about an area where the audience aggregators and the site monetizers can meet, share best practices, and help each other out. As we think through what this area will look like, I’d love to hear your ideas. Would a peer-ranked directory of flash programmers be useful? How about a forum discussing community building guidelines? Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts. As a virtual village well, I hope the Yahoo! Publisher Network will not only be a place to get work done but also be a place for its members to meet each other and share their collective expertise.

 

—Ian Kennedy, Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network

 

SEM gurus give feedback on our new advertising platform

 

So we asked some industry insiders over to the Yahoo! Search Marketing clubhouse here in Burbank for a couple of days to chat about the new Yahoo! search advertising platform we announced recently. Not only was it a lot of fun, but we—Yahoo! that is—were able to gain valuable insight into the future of search advertising from people who have made successful careers in the field. Talk about win/win.

 

Judging from some of the responses on our guests’ various blogs, we think our little soireé was a bit of a hit. 

 

Star blogstress, Jen Slegg of JenSense fame was “very impressed with a lot of the new features in the new system” though she was disappointed that the “infamous sock monkey” never made an appearance. It’s OK, Jen, Sock Monkey is your biggest fan.

 

Barry Schwartz, editor extraordinaire for Search Engine Watch, pens copious notes both from the advertiser perspective and from the publisher perspective in addition to a point-by-point run-down of the new implementation. He also likes the even more copious Yahoo! schwag that was offered to attendees.

 

Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence says he “got a ‘deep dive’ on the Yahoo! Publisher Network” that showed “an interesting and expansive roadmap with a range of small business implications.”

 

Internet marketing consultant Andy Beal, who, by the way, speaks with the elegant cadence of a southern gentleman, recognizes that the new roll-out is “no small initiative.” Thanks, Andy.

 

Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media and Traffick enjoyed the live demo of the new platform and gained an appreciation of the “hectic but structured development process of the last 18 months.”  And Mona Elesseily, also of Page Zero / Traffick and the author of The Yahoo! Search Marketing Handbook, was pretty impressed as well.
 
Catherine Seda, Internet marketing veteran and the author of Search Engine Advertising says, “just spent two days at Yahoo!’s office. We test drove the new platform. It’s good.”

 

Golly…all this makes us feel like a debutante at a coming-out party.

 

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor

 

Flickr be fine bootie for all ye publishers

 

Ahoy there! Did ye ken that today is the official “Talk Like a Pirate Day?”

 

What? Never heard of it? That’s surprising, because since the idea came to a couple of regular guys from Oregon way back in the mid-’90s, Talk Like a Pirate Day has become a phenomenon in offices around the world. Every September 19 finds secretaries and execs alike swinging from yard-arms from coast to coast and beyond, talking pirate, walking pirate, dressing pirate and acting pirate. Don’t believe me? Check out the Talk Like a Pirate Day’s Flickr pages.

 

Talk Like a Pirate Day soon got out of hand after being mentioned in humorist Dave Barry’s column back in 2002, and its founders, Cap’n Slappy (Mark Summers) and Ol’ Chumbucket (John Baur), were forced to enlist a webmaster… er… webwench, that is, to run the movement’s growing web site.

 

Yesterday I spoke with Pat Kight (aka, piratess Jezebel), about webwenching for this cutting-edge social movement and about using Flickr to enhance her web site’s landlubber (i.e., user) experience.

 

MICHAEL MATTIS: So…uh… when and why did you become a pirate?

 

JEZEBEL: Me ol’ mates Chumbucket an’ Cap’n Slappy Shanghai’d me, they did!

 

They ain’t too technical, y’see, an’ when Our Close Personal Friend and Pulitzer Prize Winner Dave Barry wrote about Talk Like A Pirate Day, they needed a Webwench. Now we get several million visits from the piratical at heart every September.

 

MATTIS: So what is it about pirates, anyway?

 

JEZEBEL: As me ol’ mate Cap’n Slappy likes t’say, “Pirates be FUN!” And, well, there’s the rum.

 

MATTIS: How did you get started with Flickr?

 

JEZEBEL: Ah, me hearty—I be a long-time fan o’Flickr, since afore it was a part o’ Yahoo! even. Last year, when fan photos threatened t’ scuttle our ship, we moved ‘em there t’ make things easy on us. ‘Cause pirates like the easy way.

 

MATTIS: How has it helped you on talklikeapirate.com?

 

JEZEBEL: It saves me time, mate! Instead o’ processin’ photos and hand-craftin’ the pages t’ put ‘em on, I can ship the photos to Flickr, slap on a label or two an’ be back t’ pillagin’ and plunderin’ with me shipmates before ye can say “Jack Sparrow.” And the sets an’ pages look all ship-shape.

 

MATTIS: What would you say to publishers considering using Flickr?

 

JEZEBEL: Avast, ye scurvy dogs! Ye don’t know what yer missin’!
 

There you have it, straight from the webwench’s mouth. Flickr’s like buried treasure, and X marks the spot.

 

—Michael Mattis, Blog Cap’n

 

 

 

Following up on our request for blog input 

 

Two weeks ago we asked for suggestions on how we can improve the blog. You told us that and more. Below we give you our feedback on some of your feedback.

Gary asks:
Why not more posts about helping us improve our earnings? We have heard from others already about their success stories (which really does us no good unless they give advice within the column like Shoemoney did). Give us more on ad placement, categories and other strategies. Let us hear more on how to improve our earnings, not just the features YPN puts out.

Good points, Gary. We’re always looking for ways to help you earn more money. Sometimes that’s straight-up optimization tips like ad placement and color matching. Other times it’s helping you build better experiences for your users and offering techniques for driving traffic. We will explore a lot more of these strategies in detail in the months ahead.

Frank asks:
Concerning announcements: What about something like a rollout-plan for other countries then US?

Good question, but here’s the deal: There are some things we just can’t talk about, as much as we’d like to. The reason for this is pretty simple—stuff like this is proprietary strategic business information. If we offered up a solid roll-out plan to the public before all is ready, we’d be tipping our hand to the competition. If you were an auto manufacturer and had plans to debut a new line of cars that ran on air, you wouldn’t phone up the competition across the street and give them the details, would you? It’s a lot like that. Sorry. Believe me, when the time comes for new regional roll-outs, blog readers will be the first to know.

Dkearns asks:
I’d love a discussion of whether Yahoo plans to bring YPN to Yahoo360. It’s impossible to use there now because YPN uses a Javascript widget. I assume the main issue is as with all social networks– the possibility of advertising being tied to inappropriate content. But it would be good to discuss ways to police that kind of problem.

  Read the rest of this entry »

Revolution 2.0

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“The first duty of an American citizen is that he shall work in politics.”
—Theodore Roosevelt

 

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Left, right or center, many of us spend too much time griping about what we think is wrong with America. Independence Day is a day to celebrate all that is right with it—but it’s also a day to consider where our republic has been in the past, where we want to take it in the future, and how we want to get there.                               

 

Our founders rode the crest of a wave of intellectual reformation and revolution called the Enlightenment, and at great peril to their lives put into motion what others in the Old World could only dare dream of. Today, a new wave is cresting, an electronic wave, energized by the voices of the 172-plus million Americans now online, that promises to shake the nature of politics and government to their cores.
 

In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776
…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

 

We can quibble ad nauseam—and we will—over what words like “men,” “happiness,” and “rights” meant to the Founding Fathers as opposed to what they mean to us today, recognizing that it took nearly two centuries, a civil war and a civil rights struggle before the dream evoked by the words was realized, and even then, only in part.

 

Sure, we’ve got a ways to go. But we ought to be thankful that we have inherited the inspiring doctrines on this parchment, because without them, this republic, this nation, would be just another accident of geography.

 

Fathers of Invention
Our nation’s founders were also fathers of invention. Thomas Jefferson invented an encoding machine for protecting state secrets, a portable copying machine, automatic doors and a bookstand. He also made improvements on the plow and the swivel chair. Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, the lightning rod, the Franklin stove and an odometer.

 

Surely, Tom, Ben and the rest would be dazzled by how far we’ve progressed in our ability to store, reproduce, publish and share knowledge, and they would immediately recognize the impact for society and democracy. (It took me less than five minutes on the Web to find lists of the founders’ inventions, a task that might have taken me several hours or more in my high school library, 25 years ago.) But they would also, I think, be pretty miffed about how much we take what they handed down to us for granted. (Between 1960 and 1996, voter turnout in presidential elections dropped from 69 percent to 49 percent.)

 

The e-Merican Revolution
But a second American revolution is in full swing. Call it the e-Merican Revolution…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tell us what you want to hear

 

The Yahoo! Publisher Network blog will only be successful if we’re helping you to be successful. To help reach that goal, today we’re asking for feedback on how the blog can better help you.

 

In addition to the poll at right, we invite you to leave your comments. Below is a list of some of the types of posts we’ve published thus far. Have a particular topic you’d like us to explore in a given category? Let us know about it, as well as any suggestions for new categories. If you’d prefer not to leave your comments publicly, drop us a line. All ideas welcome.

 

Announcements
Yahoo! Publisher Network and Yahoo! news, policies and policy changes; planned outages, etc.

 

Product updates & enhancements
News about new features, system upgrades, interface changes and so forth

 

How-to’s
How to use and get the most out of Yahoo! Publisher Network features, Yahoo! products and services, and third-party offerings

 

Publisher spotlights and interviews
Highlighting successful publishers who illustrate how you may achieve similar goals

 

Did you know?
Tips on Yahoo! Publisher Network features and Yahoo! services you might not know about

 

Guest columns
Industry leaders both from inside Yahoo! and from outside the company share their know-how

 

Industry news
Yahoo! and outside news and links of interest to publishers from around the media and the blogosphere

 

Industry events
Upcoming industry event news, as well as reports from current and past events

 

—The Team

 

 

Lockergnome Chris Pirillo tells why

 

Last week we ran an post about Gnomedex, along with a Poll that asked why Chris Pirillo’s site was called “Lockergnome” and his conference, “Gnomedex.” Most of you got it right: “Gnome” was Chris’s high school nickname. But why? Revenge of the nerds!

 

“My college prep writing teacher called me ’shorty’ names,” admits Chris. “Midget, munchkin, knee-high, dwarf, elf… gnome. That one stuck. I wouldn’t let him call me anything but gnome. And, for some strange reason, one afternoon, as I was cleaning out my locker, I turned to my friend and announced: “Hi, I’m the Locker Gnome. It’s my job to stand by lockers and say: ‘Hi, I’m the Locker Gnome.’”

 

Continues Chris: “When I started to mess around online, I needed some type of handle (truckers have them, why can’t geeks?). ‘Locker Gnome’ was the closest thing I had… ‘Lockergnome’ is a word that, in and of itself, makes no sense. But it has quickly become a Web brand. It was a great marketing tactic… sorta.” Feel better about your Web career, now?

 

If you’re thinking about going to Gnomedex, let us and your friends know by using Upcoming.org.
 

 

Jen Slegg interviews Will Johnson on her Webmasterradio.fm show, “Click This”

 

Jen Slegg is one busy bee. Two weeks ago, she wrote her first guest column for our blog, “Color Me Clickable,” which garnered considerable attention from the publishing community the world over. That same week, Jen went on air at Webmasterradio.fm to interview none other than Will Johnson, our VP and GM here at Yahoo! Publisher Network.

 

Just in case you missed it, here’s an excerpt in which Will talks about the new direct deposit feature. Or, if you have a little more time, download the complete show and get the inside scoop on what’s happening behind the purple curtain. 

 

 

 

Welcome!

 

Since its inception, the Web has grown from a few hundred academic sites to millions of publishers across the globe. Wikis and blogs are making publishers out of everyone, while RSS is allowing individuals to reach wider audiences. In this environment of growth, services and applications like Yahoo! Answers, del.icio.us and Flickr are allowing people to form instantaneous communities of interest to connect and share insights as never before. These new platforms, services and technologies are truly transforming the web in new and exciting ways.

 

Last fall we joined this revolution by launching the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-serve platform, providing a trusted and valuable network for consumers, advertisers, developers and publishers. Our initial release has enabled publishers of all sizes to sign up for Yahoo! advertising products and receive fast, easy access to other syndicated Yahoo! content and products. Through this effort we have developed thousands of publisher relationships.

 

 

Yahoo! Publisher Network Team Members give the Sign of the Fying Y! To meet key Team Members, click on the photo.

 

As a member of the Yahoo! Publisher Network, you’re also a part of Yahoo!, with all the benefits this entails. In addition to allowing you to earn revenue by placing advertisements in your Web content and RSS Feeds, Yahoo! also enables you to enhance your user’s experiences and grow you site through dozens of services and applications.

 

While Yahoo! and the web may be still in its “adolescence,” by comparison, the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-serve platform is really in its infancy. After all, we’re still calling this a beta product, and for the time being, our advertising products are only available in the U.S.

 

Even so, this is not just a test. We are passionate about building relationships with publishers, delivering outstanding service and an industry-leading experience. And we will continue to make improvements and roll out additional features throughout the beta period.

 

To help deliver upon this experience and create an ongoing dialogue with our customers, we are excited to launch the Yahoo! Publisher Network blog. YPNblog.com will help you get the most out of Yahoo! and the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Visit frequently–or better yet–add it to your My Yahoo! page or your RSS feeds to get up-to-date information, tips, advice and stories about publishers just like you.

 

But please be assured that this is a two-way street. We want you to engage with us to shape current and future products and services that we deliver.

 

In the near future you’re going to see a lot of exciting changes on the Web and at Yahoo! We look forward to partnering with you to influence and drive this destiny.

 

 

 

Will Johnson, VP and General Manager, Yahoo! Publisher Network