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

Calling all publishers! Today we’re excited to announce the launch of APT from Yahoo!, our new advertising platform. What’s in it for you?  APT from Yahoo! is designed to help publishers access more demand and improve yield from their inventory, while simplifying ad management. We’ll keep you posted on the opportunities for Yahoo! Publisher Network publishers to participate in the platform.

In the meantime, our CEO Jerry Yang explains more about the vision of this new product in the following excerpt from a Yodel Ancedotal post.

I started dreaming about this day 18 months ago, when I laid out my vision for our board of directors on how Yahoo! could play a unique role in changing the face of online advertising. In fact, Sue and I called it Nirvana at the time – a platform that would be to 2009 what radio was to 1924, TV to 1947, color TV to 1965, and the Internet to 1993.

Sounds like hype, right? We don’t think so. As Sue posted in April, we listened to all of the pain points that our partners shared about the process of buying and selling ads. Would you believe it takes more than 30 manual operational steps to move from ad strategy concept to launching that ad? It involves faxes (!!) and sometimes weeks in proposal processing. Audiences are now distributed across a sea of web sites and are harder to find, understand, and put a value on. Madison Avenue might think it’s a shame Johnny Walker Red doesn’t flow at the office anymore.

APT looks to change all that. It’s simple. It’s open. It’s fast (like minutes vs. days). It provides a new level of control. It offers cross-selling more easily than ever been before. It will provide large amounts of quality inventory. It will help advertisers customize and target their messages more precisely through advanced targeting. And it will drive results. All this from a single online application. No more cobbled together processes or impressions. No more wasted time.

For more about the new platform, read Jerry’s full blog post.

Create your own version of Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! has been saying for a while that search should be open, and it’s tough to imagine it getting much more open than our new Web services platform — Yahoo! Search BOSS. BOSS, or Build your Own Search Service, is just that — a programming interface that lets you create your own version of the Yahoo! algorithmic search experience.

This is something that might help you strengthen your content as a publisher. What BOSS lets you do is pretty wide open. Read the Yahoo! search blog or our developer site for the gory techie details, but with BOSS you can re-rank natural search results or blend them with your own content; customize the search result presentation to match your user interface without Yahoo! branding or attribution; use a framework we provide to mash up BOSS search content with other data sources; access Web, news and image search; and get unlimited queries.

And what can you do with all of that? We’re sure you can think of something.

– The Team

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

Editor’s Note: The new name for this product is APT from Yahoo!.

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