Enter the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! Publishing Contest

As if monetizing your PDFs weren’t enough, Yahoo! and Adobe are giving you another great reason to participate in the Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo! beta: great prizes.

The prizes are for a contest—our attempt to find the best publishers of ad-enabled PDFs out there. To enter, just sign up for the beta and start publishing your ad-enabled PDFs.  The winner will be determined by a combination of success metrics, such as the number of PDFs published, revenue, impressions, and other ingredients in the “secret sauce” we use in the beta. 

Did we mention the great prizes?  For the grand prize winner, we are offering the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection, which helps you to design across media—print, web, interactive, mobile, video, and film—in the most comprehensive, creative environment ever produced.  The grand prize is valued at $2499.  In addition, all publishers who participate will be entered into a raffle for $100 Yahoo! Search Advertising dollars, a great way to start publicizing your PDFs and increase your audience. 

To enter, click over to the sign up page and send us your Ads for Adobe PDF powered by Yahoo! beta application.  To see the official contest rules, click here. 

–Mike McCullough

Yahoo! plans to change the way you monetize your site

Every so often, entire industries are transformed by innovation—and we at Yahoo! think we’re on the verge of transforming the advertising industry. It’s an industry ripe for transformation. Especially with display ads, everything from finding the right audience to booking inventory to testing ads is decidedly old school, and not in the good way. With AMP! from Yahoo!, our forthcoming advertising management platform, we plan to change forever the way you interact with everyone in your advertising world—and help you to get the most from your pages. Read about it, and see a video of it in action, in this post by Yahoo! President Sue Decker.

—The Team

  …and other stories from Yahoo! and the blogosphere

We like lists — five reasons to use display, seven linkbait tips, and lots more — so Jen Slegg’s 52 easy ways optimize your blog while on your coffee break makes us positively giddy. So many tips! Now we just have to go check the ways we’re not optimized. On our coffee breaks, of course.

MyBlogLog has some nifty new widgets that make it easier to let your readers know what’s happening with you. The idea is that even if you’re too busy to update your “about me” section, the widgets will look at what you’re posting or bookmarking across the web and update your information for you.

Speaking of widgets, you might already be using some of the applications that pop up all over the social media world. Yahoo! has joined forces with Google and MySpace to form the OpenSocial Foundation, which wants to provide “common ‘plumbing’ that lets social applications run on many different websites.”

And we couldn’t leave you without some pop-culture proof that Yahoos are smart: Dave Sikula, one of the “surfers”who built the Yahoo! directory, has won a slot on Jeopardy  — and $15,000 in his first night there. Needless to say, Dave will be buying lunch in the Yahoo! cafeteria for a while.

– The Team

Supporting Material for Your Blog

A nifty new WordPress plug-in lets WordPress bloggers use Yahoo! content to support their bloggery. When you’re composing a blog post in the WordPress admin interface, the Yahoo! Shortcuts beta plug-in automagically begins matching terms in your post to Yahoo! aggregated content, such as company names, stock tickers, map locations, news, product names and Flickr photos.

You decide whether to keep or reject any (or all) recommended shortcuts before your post goes live. When you publish, your selected shortcuts appear in your post according to the format you choose. It’s very cool.

For more info, check out this post on the Y! Search Blog and definitely have a look at the tutorial. 

—Michael Mattis

Yahoo! Publisher Network and Adobe Team Up

Adobe Systems and Yahoo! just launched a new service, called Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! This limited beta program enables online publishers to earn advertising revenue through their Adobe PDF-based content.

For example, let’s say that your website hosts downloadable PDF files, such as instructions, diagrams, forms or other documents that your users can access. Publishers accepted into the limited beta program will be able to place contextual Yahoo! Search Marketing ads next to the content of these PDF files and earn money on a cost-per-click basis, just as they do with web-based ads on their own sites.

For more information, click here.

To apply for this limited beta, click here.

—Michael Mattis

New Yahoo! Blog Focuses on Tech and the Folks Behind It

When asked by a customs official if he had anything to declare, Oscar Wilde once famously exclaimed, “Nothing but my genius!”

I’ve noticed a lot of that “genius” thing going around Yahoo! Our geniuses are get-your-hands-dirty technophiles and hard-core geeks who love pulling out the digital lug wrenches, banging out solutions and inventing cool new tools.

There’s so much going on at any one time that it can be hard to keep up. That’s why we’ve launched Next*, a brand-new Yahoo! blog that hones in on all the latest from Yahoo’s top technocrats.

Check it out and see what’s Next*.

—Michael Mattis

Yahoo! to Acquire BlueLithium

As you may recall, we recently finalized our acquisition of Right Media, one of the fastest growing display ad exchanges and clearing houses for publisher ad inventory. If you haven’t looked into Right Media’s DMX product yet, you should definitely do so. It’s a must-do for publishers looking to enhance revenue.

Display advertising is great, but there’s more to cover. “Performance marketing” is one of the fastest growing fields online. Performance marketing, sometimes called “direct response,” drives specific transactions, such as getting a certain lead or the sale of an individual product or service.

BlueLithium will bring Yahoo! a ton of expertise in performance marketing and targeting, as well as valuable new audiences. We’ll be able to drive performance-based campaigns both on the Yahoo! network and off.

For publishers, this will eventually mean more options and flexibility, as well as the possibility of new opportunities for revenue. For more on BlueLithium, see Todd Teresi’s post on Yodel Anecdotal.    

—The Team

Kids’ Crooked House Visits the Burbank Campus

On the surface, it seems so simple. After all, it’s just a nursery rhyme:

There was a crooked man,
Who walked a crooked mile.
He found a crooked sixpence
Upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat,
Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.

It’s when you start to think about what that word “stile” means that it gets interesting. Just what is a stile, anyway? A turnstile, of course, is one of those one-way revolving gates that lets people in or out, but not out or in, respectively.

A stile, it turns out, is a border, and the border in the rhyme is the one between Scotland and England. And the crooked house? That’s an allegory, too. It refers to the newly cobbled-together United Kingdom presided over by the doomed King Charles I in the 17th Century.

But we’re not going to let all that weighty knowledge spoil our fun at hosting a genuine, Yahoo! branded, Kids’ Crooked House, right here at on Burbank campus. In fact, this knowledge only adds to the good times.

This wonky little playhouse was built especially for Yahoo! by Glenn Halliday, owner of KidsCrookedHouse.com and one of the winners of our Ultimate Connection contest. If there’s a 90-degree angle in this miniature villa, our little friends here couldn’t find it. It’s been great having it around, and the big Yahoos love it almost as much as the little ones. It’s been a lesson in geometry, poetry, history and fun.

Thanks, Glen, and again, congrats.

—The Team

Yahoo! closes acquisition of Right Media, Inc.

Back in April of this year, Yahoo! announced plans to buy Right Media Inc.  As of today, the acquisition is official and we wanted to share the news with you.

So, how does an open ad exchange provide value for Yahoo! advertisers, publishers and ad networks?

Well, a little back story might help.

Right Media is the creator of a Direct Media Exchange, a self-service publisher product that allows publishers to sign up for, manage and optimize against multiple advertising networks through one interface. Yahoo! recognized the value of the Direct Media Exchange and knew that Right Media would be the “right fit” for its advertisers and publishers.

For advertisers, an open exchange will provide great inventory and audience options from all of participants in this marketplace. Advertisers will also have increased control and visibility into the buying process.

We believe this will provide great value to publishers as they will be given an opportunity to bundle their own ad inventory with inventory within the exchange.

Advertising networks benefit through the exchange by having the opportunity to compete with the largest players. The open exchange creates transparency and accountability, which should create a more level playing field for advertisers and publishers—all valuable assets that we can say “Right on!” to. 

–Roger Park, Y! Blogeratus

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