“You In?” program encourages acts of good during the holiday season

Bob Hope once said, “If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”

Truer words were seldom spoken. At Yahoo!, we strive not only to not be evil, we want to do a little good. That’s why, during this year’s season of sharing, we’ve launched the year-end giving campaign “You In?”.
The campaign, designed to send a cascade of kindness throughout the Yahooniverse and beyond, is an extension of our Yahoo! for Good Purple Acts of Kindness program, and aims to encourage you, the most valuable part of our global community of 600 million, to give back a little of your good fortune through random acts of kindness—and encourages others to do the same.

And without necessarily spending a dime.

Read the rest of this entry »

An Announcement from Right Media

Right Media will discontinue supporting the Direct Media Exchange (DMX)—our self-serve platform for small publishers looking to monetize their sites. The DMX site will serve ads through Jan. 31t and DMX participants can access their reports through March 1.

For more on this anncouncement, see the full post on the Right Media blog by Stephanie Dorman, Senior Director, Client Services and Operations.

—The Team

Publisher related news bits

With the Holiday season approaching, you’ll soon be swamped with a massive to-do list. We thought we’d give you a selection of publisher-related news and bits for you, so you can have more time for those seemingly never ending holiday tasks.

Does the Internet care about you making money?
Publishing 2.0 has an interesting analysis of how the market and your business model may not actually be actually seeing eye-to-eye.  The post uses the example of the newspaper industry and how it approached the online industry with a sense of entitlement, which may have caused it some obstacles. The post says, “Ask not what the market can do for you, but what you can do for the market.” Read more here.

A new twist for Twittering?
Marketing Vox reported that Twitter may consider charging companies to use its microblogging feed for consumer purposes. Last week Twitter announced that it had surpassed the one billion published tweets mark.  For folks who don’t know, Twitter allows users to publish “microblogs” of up to 140 characters. Read more here. 

Open source video
Do you publish or blog with video? The Creative Commons blog recently posted a story on Kaltura, an open-source platform for video creation. As the blog reports, “Kaltura is a robust platform uncommon among web-apps that includes the ability to annotate, remix, edit, and share video collaboratively over the web.” If you need video but not a big editing package, it might be worthwhile to check it out. 

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

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

Publisher news bits from the blogosphere

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a partnership with HP and Intel to create a “global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.” What’s cloud computing? Well, we had to look it up, too, but the simple way to describe it is as a way for customers to tap into computing resources that can be anywhere, and only pay for what they use.

“Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way toward building the next generation of the Web,” says Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research. “As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.”

We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about the cloud computing project.

Picnik basket
Are you a big shutterbug, or use a lot of photos from Flickr on your site? The Flickr blog recently announced they are working with the folks at Picnik on a nifty tool. Starting today, you can send a batch of uploaded pictures to Picnik for editing, crop and edit, and then save everything to your photostream.

MyBlogLog overhauled
Calling all bloggers out there: Please report to the new MyBlogLog site and dig their new redesign. The sleek and clean design still has all the features you’ve come to know and love, but check out the New with Me feature, which now runs down the center of the page. Profiles in the past were pretty static, but now they become a dynamic representation of your current activity.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

More Than an Ad Network

The Yahoo! Publisher Network is more than an ad network. It’s your gateway to all kinds of Yahoo! publisher and business services.

From the Publisher Services tab in your secure account interface, you can access all kinds of useful tools, marketing services, widgets, and tips of to help you build and enhance your site and drive traffic.

WFor example, with Yahoo! you can:

• Register a new domain, host your site, build a new one using Yahoo! Site Builder and even start your own online business selling your products.

• Add search options and liven your site up with action buttons, badges (such as MyBlogLog, Answers, Upcoming, del.icio.us and Flickr) that also help you gain more visibility through social media.

• Help your readers get there with Yahoo! Maps.

• Develop your own new applications and widgets through the Yahoo! Developer Network, find content and images to license through Creative Commons, and add video and podcasts.

• In addition, Right Media’s DMX allows you to augment your contextual ads with display ad from a huge network of networks. Direct Media Exchange is a mass market application for small to middle-sized publishers — it’s not just a free ad server, but a way to utilize the power of the auction (the Right Media Exchange) to get more revenue and save time managing your advertising partners. Read more about all their great products and services on Right Media’s blog.

And in Other News
Being a Yahoo! publisher myself, I have had a lot of fun interacting with you, my fellow publishers, here on the blog. But all good things must come to an end, and t. Today is my last day at Yahoo!. I’ll be moving on to take a position at BNET.com, the business arm of C|Net Networks, where I’ll be editing a number of business-related (surprise!) blogs and helping grow an active community around them. The experience I’ve gained here at Yahoo! has been invaluable, and I will continue to work with my friends here at Yahoo! on new features for BNET.com (a RightMedia publisher).

It’s been great learning and growing with the publishing community, and I wanted to thank you for all the great feedback. Even the occasional ribbing was informative.

Cheers!

—Michael Mattis

Monetize and Analyze 

Earlier this week, I promised to offer up five useful things that I learned at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas, but I only gave you three. I’m such a tease. Really, it’s all part of my cunning plan to keep you coming back to the blog. Looks like it worked.  Anyway, here are numbers four and five of the five things.

4. There are 7 1/2 ways to monetize your blog

i. Run contextual ads—You know, like from Yahoo! Publisher Network and RightMedia’s DMX.

ii. Sell physical goods—Branded merchandise, such as T-shirts, mugs, ball-point pens and so forth. There are many vendors out there who can help you do this at a minimal cost. This is only worthwhile once you have established a broad audience.

iii. Solicit user donations—Your blog can be partly or wholly user-supported, like PBS or NPR. PayPal offers a donation button that you can install on your site in seconds. Do you blog on a political or scientific topic? There are scientific institutions and political think-tanks out there with money to burn. It won’t hurt to hit them up for a donation. What’s the worst that could happen?

iv. Join an affiliate ad network—Affiliate networks offer text and display advertising for hundreds of vendors in a wide range of categories, from automobiles to vacation rentals. Affiliate network publishers are paid a percentage of each sale. Most BlogWorld-goers that I talked to agreed that text links embedded in your content tend to work better than banners. And remember, there are many ancillary goods that can be offered. People who like high-end jewelry, for example, may also be apt to buy expensive handbags. For more affiliate tips, click here. 

v. Negotiate direct ad sales—Do you have highly targeted content that caters to a niche audience? Have you developed, or are you in the process of developing, a significant audience? Don’t be afraid to contact advertisers directly and propose a deal. The worst thing they can do is say no. You’ll find that once you have one deal going, competitors in that niche may be more likely to get onboard. Some advertisers may be happy to place a display ad on your site for branding purposes if your audience is targeted correctly. 

vi. Explore pay-per-post—You may have heard of the controversial concept of advertisers paying bloggers to blog about their products. But if done ethically and with genuine interest in the product niche, you may be able to earn extra income and help expand your reader base.

vii. Offer subscriptions—If you have high-value content to offer, users will pay you for it. Consider developing tiers of content, some free, some via paid subscription.

vii ½. Make your blog into a book—This crosses the line between selling physical goods and offering subscriber content. The fact is, people like having physical books around. Who doesn’t enjoy the smell of fresh ink? You can also offer unique content in a book and arrange your content and illustrations to be both informative and attractive. There are many on-the-fly publishers who can help turn your blog into a book.

5. Analytics are your friend
Advertisers, partners and affiliates like to know things, such as how much traffic you’re getting, how many of your users are repeats, what your “bounce rate” is, where your traffic is coming from, how long your visitors stay, and so forth. You want to know where people are clicking, which pages they’re lingering on, and which they’re staying away from, so that you can adjust your content and revenue-earning strategies accordingly. There are many analytics packages available.

I also made quite a few new friends and professional contacts at the show. In the coming weeks, you’ll see some valuable new contributions by some of the many industry experts whom I met at BlogWorld.

In the meantime, here’s a brief round-up of BlogWorld coverage:

Turns out that despite all the hoopla, not everyone in Vegas knows what a blog is, as Fox News discovered.

There’s more to corporate blogging than just begging your CEO to let you set one up.

Here’s a great list of video interviews by our friends over at Build a Better Blog.

Zac Jonhson blogs Marc Cuban’s keynote speech.

Debbie Weil listens to BlogWorld impresario, Dave Taylor, opine.

Steven Van Yoder teaches you how to get slightly famous.

For Flickr photos streams, click here and here.

—Michael Bloggeratus

Our Article on Linkbait Gets a Thumbs-Up

A regular reader and commentator on our blog, Gary R. Hess, recently gave us kudos for our January, 2007 post, “Leveraging Linkbait,” by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.

Writing in his blog, Gary called out “Leveraging Linkbait” as one of the 12 best articles on the subject of linkbaiting.

Never heard of linkbaiting? It’s cleaner that it sounds. In fact, linkbaiting can be an effective addition to your overall marketing mix, helping drive more traffic to your site. Read the original post, as well as the follow up, to find out how to make linkbait work for you.

Well done, Rand, and thanks, Gary.

—Michael Mattis, Head Linkbaitist

On Monday, October 1st, between 7:00 and 8:00 p.m. Pacific Time, we’ll be performing a routine update to our system. Access to your Yahoo! Publisher Network account during that time may be limited. This update should not impact your account or the serving of ads on your site.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

—The Team

“Cloning” Content is a Bad Practice

Okay. So I’m not that all that keen on Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture.

But there’s one thing that Keen and I can agree on. We both hate it when we’ve discovered that publishers have obviously cut-and-pasted content from one site to another without at least citing where it came from—especially when it’s our content. 

It’s frustrating when you go searching for a piece of information and you find the same info, written in exactly the same way, on a hundred different sites. It is a bad experience that just doesn’t help.

In fact, we’re so uptight about it here at Yahoo! Publisher Network that one sure fire way to get kicked out is to “clone” someone else’s content. It’s not just cut-and-paste that gets us riled. Some folks think it’s okay to load up their sites with little games, time wasters and other digital bling that they’ve either copied illegally, or have bought from someone else. Either way, it’s just not cricket, at least not in this network.

Call it a network quality thing
Yahoo! Publisher Network is working toward being the highest quality ad network that we can be. We’ve got our standards, just like any young debutante. We want to give users a high quality experience, something more-or-less original that is both useful and entertaining.

True, some sites need more content than others—backgrounders, critical articles, product reviews, definitions, blog entries, essays, Flickr photos and so forth. But there’s a quality way to fill that need and avoid cloning. At Creative Commons you can search and find content under flexible copyright that you can use as long as you abide by the site’s terms and conditions and the author’s restrictions. 

—Michael Mattis, Clone Ranger