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

Mixing display with text ads for fun and profit with Right Media

Editor’s Note: Studies (like this one) have shown that online ad campaigns that combine text and display ads are more effective than those that rely on one or the other exclusively. At Yahoo! Publisher Network, we’re trying to meet that same demand among our publishers, while building the most open network we can. That’s why we acquired Right Media. Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange allows you to auction off your inventory to an array of bidders from different ad networks. Right Media’s Patrick McCarthy explains…

Yahoo! publishers might be asking: “Hmm, Yahoo! already has a product for us. So how will acquiring Right Media benefit me?”

This was a thought that could be heard rumbling through the Oregon halls of Right Media when we began acquisition talks with Yahoo!. Luckily, the answer was pretty simple, because of how Direct Media Exchange was built and how Yahoo! is embracing the open philosophy that we’ve been living with at Right Media.

Allow me to explain… Direct Media Exchange is a free web application that allows publishers to create an auction of their ad inventory that consists of their current ad network partners and the numerous display ad networks that are directly participating in Direct Media Exchange and bidding in real time. This means that Yahoo! Publisher Network and Direct Media Exchange can happily co-exist together.

The benefits are simple:

• Easier ad network management
• More potential revenue

Not bad if you ask me, or our publishers.

OK, so now that I have your interest, how does it really work?

1. First, add Yahoo! Publisher Network ad code and average CPM for each ad size into Direct Media Exchange, as well as code from any other ad networks you might work with. (Advertisers that you have sold campaigns to yourself are also welcome.)
2. Put the Direct Media Exchange ad code on your web pages.
3. When a user views your site, we run an auction in real time to see which ad network will pay you the most. If that’s Yahoo! Publisher Network, then great! We’ll show the Yahoo! Publisher Network ads that are relevant to your site’s content. If it’s another network that’s participating directly in the Direct Media Exchange, then we’ll display ads from that network. You win either way.
4. (Optional) Cash your checks and go to the beach!

The Direct Media Exchange team is happy to be a part of Yahoo!, and we’re more excited to be working on even more great advancements in the near future to make your life easier—while also making more money.

To find out more about Direct Media Exchange and get signed up, visit http://direct.rightmedia.com/

— Patrick McCarthy, Director, Direct Media Exchange

Yahoo! News profiles the provocative

Are you the sort of someone who lives and breathes the online world? Who’s doing something with the medium that’s challenging and different? The kind of person who likes to stir things up? Maybe a bit of an agent provocateur?

If you think those descriptions apt—and if you’re regular reader here, you probably do—you may be one of the “People of the Web.”

“People of the Web” is a new series of profiles by Yahoo! News, highlighting the adventurers, pot-stirrers, pioneers, firebrands, loose cannons, privateers, mischief-makers and assorted wise-acres making waves, while making it, on the Web right now.

Recent “People of the Web” profiles include former “Growing Pains” sitcom start turned online evangelist, Kirk Cameron, Caleb Shickles, the creator of “Hug Nation,” and Josh Wolf the journalist (or is he really an activist?) who served jail time for refusing to reveal his sources to a grand jury.

You or someone you know could be next. To suggest a “People of the Web” profile, visit the POTW feedback page. And be sure to join MyBlogLog before you visit POTW. That way, even if you’re not chosen to be profiled, everyone will know you’ve been there—it’s like leaving a little link bait everywhere you go. (That’s me in the upper left.)

—Michael Mattis

Mash Like Mad at the Yahoo! Apps Gallery

Yahoos and Yahoo! Publishers alike have shown that they go mental for for mash-ups, those delightfully kludgy apps that merge web apps together to create whole new ones. In fact, when Yahoo! has held regular Hack Days for some time now, propeller-heads both inside and outside Yahoo! let their techno-ivity soar.

Every day is Hack Day at the Yahoo! Application Gallery, a web site where you can browse and download others’ mash-ups made using Yahoo! technologies—including Maps, Flickr, Yahoo! Music Engine and Search—and share your own.

Check out:

Splashr
A Flickr-based photo album app

CityRes’s Map-based Hotel Booking
CityRes has created several apps that allow user to book hotel through the Yahoo! Maps API

BruteSearch
A cool search bar tool that helps you organize your searches

Answers All-Over-the-World
This work-in progress gathers Yahoo! Answers from all over the world in near-real time

Yahoo! Messenger Flight Planner
Two Messenger users can search for, find, choose and book flights—together

Flogr
A highly customizable photo blogging app that you can use without hacking blog software

Be sure to visit the Yahoo! Application Gallery for more mash-ups.

—Michael Mattis, Blog Editor