As we shared in February, Yahoo! and Microsoft have formed a search alliance that we believe will help provide more rapid innovation and better monetization to our partners. Innovating search and search advertising is essential to Yahoo!’s strategy and will help deliver more value to partners like you.

Over the last several months, we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to develop a high-quality transition experience for our partners. While there’s nothing you need to do at this time, we did want to let you know that your Yahoo! account manager will be in touch in the coming weeks to provide you with a detailed overview and to answer any questions that you may have.

Transition timing
Our priority is to make this transition as seamless as possible for you. We know how important the holiday selling season is to both our advertisers and partners. That’s why our aim is to complete the transition in the U.S. and Canada before the start of the 2010 holiday season.

Next steps and resources
Please note there are several resources to help you stay up to date on the transition:

Transition Center – The Yahoo! Transition Center includes articles, downloadable materials.
YPN Blog – The Yahoo! Publisher Network blog will post regularly about the transition.
Updates – We’ll send you updates via email, and your account managers will reach out to you directly, so you won’t miss a thing.

We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

— The Team

Earlier today, Yahoo! emailed a small group of publishers participating in the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-service beta program (also known as “YPNO” or “Yahoo Publisher Network Online”), to inform them that we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. This only affects our self-service platform for small publishers who syndicate our Content Match (contextual) listings.

No change for large partners/affiliate network
This decision does not affect nor impact our relationship with large direct publishers and partners in any way. As Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has stated previously, our publisher (or affiliate) network is an important part of our business, and Yahoo! will continue to invest and innovate to ensure that our publishers realize the best value possible from our partnership.

No change to Content Match ads
Publishers participating in the self-service beta program displayed our advertisers’ Content Match ads (or text-based ads), but this made up only a small amount of total impression volume. Advertisers’ Content Match ads will continue to be displayed on our large, direct partners’ sites, as well as across relevant content on Yahoo! sites. Sponsored Search ads are not affected by this announcement at all.

Publishers with questions regarding this announcement are welcome to contact us through the YPN portal.

— The Team

When it comes to online news innovation, you’ve got to love the “HuffPost,” as the influential news and commentary site’s followers like to call it. The HuffPost (a.k.a., The Huffington Post) just introduced a new app that lets users read top HuffPo articles without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage.

With this groovy little widget, it now takes just one click to scan the most popular HuffPo stories, preview what’s latest from its bloggers, and flip through the dozens of sections. It’s impossible to do that without several articles grabbing your attention and inspiring you to comment.

“I’m excited about the new app we’ve developed for Yahoo!” says the HuffPo’s founder and political activist, Arianna Huffington. “Over 260 million people use Yahoo! email accounts and 550 million people visit Yahoo! every month—and now they can keep up with The Huffington Post without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage, simply by adding our new app.”

Yahoo! OpenID opens up a world of social media to promote your brand
Once your thoughts have been provoked, the HuffPost also has you covered there. The site accepts Yahoo! OpenID, a core element of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Your regular, familiar Yahoo! sign-in now works on HuffPost Social News and links it all together with Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and the rest of your online social network—depending on the permission level you set.

Any publisher can have its own app for people to use on the Yahoo! homepage and in their My Yahoo! accounts. It’s officially known as a Yahoo! Application Platform app, but you can refer to it by the much friendlier “YAP app”—Hey, Yahoo! developers do. It’s an open environment, so you can build a YAP app yourself. Any YAP app. There’s no business deal involved, just a straightforward approval process. You can read all about it in the YDN YAP documentation. Creating a YAP app is a smart, cost effective business move for any publication wanting to get its message, its brand, and its advertisers in front of users.

For more on how you can use Yahoo! OpenID and Yahoo!’s social distribution platform on your site to create social media buzz, check out the quickstart guide.

—Chris Marlowe

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.

Here’s how it works. First, go to kindness.yahoo.com and enter your random act of kindness. You might have dropped off a raincoat at a homeless shelter, or donated a sawbuck to fight breast cancer, or sent a holiday greeting card to a disabled veteran, or simply just remembered to say “happy holidays” to the bus driver. You get the idea.

Once you’ve submitted your act, it will automatically appear on your Yahoo! Status and can be shared on your Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace pages. It will also be displayed on an interactive global map on the campaign’s website at kindness.yahoo.com.

For example, your post might say, “I just helped an elderly person with a walker cross the street. You In?” and provide a link so others can join in and share their own acts of kindness.

So get in, give well and ask others, “You In?” It’s a great way to give Scrooge the what-for during a tough season. To get you in the mood, here are a few more quotes from the great and good:

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”—Mark Twain

“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.”—Seneca

“The more sympathy you give, the less you need.”—Malcolm S. Forbes

—The Team

(Special thanks to Quote Garden for the inspiring words above; image courtesy Ed Youdon via Flickr, CC 2.0)

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

By all accounts, 2009 was pretty rough year: economic meltdowns, persistent war, piracy on the high seas, fires and floods. You name it, we endured it.

But not all the news was bad. This year saw airline Captain “Sully” Sullenberger save the lives of 155 people by successfully ditching hos plane in the Hudson; a new world land speed record for a steam-powered car; America’s first commercial Zeppelin—yeah, you heard that right: Zeppelin—service took off into the wild blue yonder over the San Francisco Bay Area; NASA enjoyed a flawless Space Shuttle record and discovered water on the moon; the Large Hadron Collider set a world record in accelerating protons to near light speed and, here at Yahoo!, we announced a dazzling new brand relaunch that promises to be a boon for both our users and advertisers.

Yahoo!’s been crunching the Year in Review numbers since 2001. What we discovered in 2009 is that people all over are coping—and escaping, dealing with the big-footprint issues of the day while seeking comfort in what was good.

This year, you can share your own experience in 140 characters or fewer by Tweeting it on Yahoo’s 2009 Year in Review site, or view the 2009 Rewind video.

—The Team

What’s behind a high bounce rate?
Users “bounce”—that is, click away and say goodbye to your website—when they find your homepage less than interesting. Search Marketing Standard’s Rebecca Appleton gives four reasons why users bounce and tells you what you can do about it. She’s also kind enough to offer tips on how to optimize your landing page for PPC. All that for free. There’s a reason we like her.

Tweet all about it!
Unless you live in L.A. or have an expense account fat enough for your company to fly you there, you’re probably missing the 140 Character Conference (#140), yesterday and today. Well, never fear, Twitter is here. Follow the Tweets by conference-goers, including our own Jeff Sweat. Good stuff for the aspiring publisher to know.

Viral marketing…with Bunnies!
Publishers are always looking for little ways to get big returns. Here’s a quick case study on how to make your viral marketing breed like rabbits: At the recent premier of “Rabbit Fever,” a funny documentary about competitive bunny breeders, the producers gave out bunny ears to everyone in the theater, and took photos. Then they put the photos on Flickr, knowing that everyone in the audience on Facebook or Twitter or with a blog would post about it (like we are right now). Talk about cheap, effective viral marketing. (Full disclosure: The author of this post was in that audience. See if you can find him in his rabbit ears on Flickr.)

Oh, the stories they could tell
Over at Search Engine Land, Ciarán Norris talks about the best (and worst) stories that brands have told via social media. Some solid do’s and do-not’s from history.

Dialing for yodels
OK, most phones don’t actually “ring” anymore. They chirp, ping, buzz, vibrate, and sing “Crazy Train” or just about any other song. But now you can get your phone to actually yodel. Not only that, you can make it yodel in just about any style you want: hip-hop, a cappella, R&B, reggae, bluegrass, what-have-you. To get your own yodel and for info on other Yahoo! innovations this week, click over to Yodel Anecdotal.

Developers, in the words of the late, great Rodney Dangerfield,  ”get no respect.” Except here at Yahoo!

We celebrate the geek every year with Open Hack Day. This time, we did it in New York’s Times Square.  Hackers from all over gathered and submitted their best hacks  for fun and prizes over a 24-hour period.

For all the details, click over to Yodel Anecdotal. Or just watch the movie…

Yahoo! CMO Elisa Steele unveils new global marketing campaign

Yahoo! chief marketing officer Elisa Steele announced our largest branding campaign ever in an IAB Mixx keynote address, telling the Ad Week audience that our message to consumers is: It’s you.

“We’d like to provide consumers more of what they want, and less of what they don’t,” Elisa said. That means bring them the best of their worlds (their friends, families and interests) and the world (news, information, and entertainment).

Elisa pointed to recent launches of our front page, Mail, and mobile apps are good examples of how we’re bringing both together. “Everything needs to be grounded on this concept of personal relevance.”

In the keynote, Elisa unveiled a video and still images that will be part of a global campaign. “The Internet is under new management: Yours,” one ad said. She also played new versions of the Yahoo! yodel.

For more about the keynote and the branding campaign, check back here later today.

For more details on the new Yahoo! branding campaign,  see Elisa’s post on Yodel Anecdotal.

— The Team

Online car shopping site Cars.com wanted to help automobile manufacturer advertisers extend their reach to target users shopping for specific cars beyond Cars.com—and found a way to increase clicks by letting advertisers target potential customers on Yahoo! pages, too. 

About Cars.com
Cars.com, a division of Classified Ventures, LLC, offers online ad solutions for automakers, dealers and private-party sellers in the form of classified advertising solutions, banner advertisements and lead-generation.

The problem
Cars.com wanted to offer its advertisers more frequency—and more inventory to choose from—but wanted a high-quality source that its advertisers could trust. An automobile purchase is a high-ticket, considered decision, and the traditional consumer shopping behavior is changing due to the economy. The time horizon has extended, as shoppers consider switching to a new vehicle category, and shoppers are more likely to visit multiple dealerships before locking in their decision on a make or model. So insulating the buyer experience from other manufacturers is now even more important to a manufacturer than ever before, no matter where they go online.

“We are a pure-play automotive site with comprehensive new and used car inventory, as well as editorial content that assists car shoppers in making an informed purchase,” says Joan Ritter, Director of Advertising Marketing Development at Cars.com.  “What this means is that the only reason someone goes to Cars.com is because they are in car-shopping mode—whether early on or late in the decision process. It’s extremely efficient in delivering a car-shopping audience.” What Cars.com needed was a re-targeting solution that would help it extend its capability to other inventory.

The solution
Cars.com formed a partnership with Yahoo! that lets it sell Yahoo! non-guaranteed inventory to its advertisers. “We were attracted to the Yahoo! name, as well as the fact that our clients didn’t view Yahoo! as an ad network,” says Karen Kurtz, Advertising Product Manager of Cars.com. Advertisers felt that Yahoo! would place their ads on higher-quality inventory than ad networks would, giving them advertisers more impressions and more control of their images. 

In addition, Cars.com can tag a user, including the type of car they were investigating and the regions they live in, and run ads for relevant cars when those users visit pages on the Yahoo! site. “On Yahoo!, we get an extra boost,” Kurtz says. “They may not be looking for a car at the moment, but we can serve them a brand reminder after their visit to Cars.com. Because the ad placement on the Yahoo! network is no longer on an in-market site, it is interruptive, and therefore click-through behavior can be impressive. For those manufacturers who make clicks to their own site an objective, this can be very valuable.”

The results
The Yahoo! partnership has dramatically increased the amount of impressions that Cars.com can offer to its advertisers. That, in turn, gives them more opportunities to reach users. “Yahoo! has 30 to 100 times the inventory that we do,” Kurtz says. “We can present it to advertisers as an upsell to help them extend their brand.”

Cars.com says that the partnership and its retargeting capabilities has made it simpler for advertisers to get their ads in front of the right kind of customers. Automobile companies can buy Yahoo! ads for users who checked out competing cars, a practice called “conquesting” that Cars.com typically doesn’t allow on its own site.

Says Ritter: “We consider the Cars.com Yahoo! re-targeting buy to be the ultimate one-two punch solution for both local dealerships, as well as for manufacturers. It marries the Cars.com quality audience to the Yahoo! distribution network. And our advertisers and agencies are excited about the ability to get such a powerful ad buy in one fell swoop.”

— The Team