Publisher news of interest as we march into March

Ready for spring? Us, too. Here are a few random items that have poked through the topsoil and warmed our winter-weary brains:

Yahoo! Buzz turns one
At the party celebrating my first birthday, I wowed attendees by taking my first steps. Our social content site Buzz recently celebrated its first birthday, but it hit the ground running from Day One. Brian McMullin, a Product Lead for Buzz, discusses the year’s highlights in a post on our corporate blog Yodel Anecdotal. If you haven’t buzzed on over to the hive to see how we sting the competition with the ability for any publisher to add content, now’s your chance.

Finding the missing links
Inbound link-building may not be the Holy Grail of online publishing, but it’s pretty close. In this informative article on Search Engine Watch, Carrie Hill provides several useful strategies for increasing the number of links that point toward your site. More importantly perhaps, she also cautions against link-building tactics that will decrease the quality of traffic and make your efforts look spammy. Carrie obviously knows what’s she’s doing, because we’ve now linked to her article twice in one paragraph.

Offline publishing: The beginning of the end?
Nearly every day I see or hear a reference to Amazon’s Kindle device, and it seems one newspaper after the next is folding or laying off employees. That puts online publishers in the driver’s seat, a view supported by this article on InternetNews.com, which describes the Hearst Corp.’s plans to introduce a digital reading device of its own. I guess I’m still a relative Luddite in this area, because I have yet to see a Kindle in person, and the last book I bought was a paper-and-ink version of a 50-year-old tome that has curiously risen up Amazon’s bestseller list in the last eight weeks.

Deep in the heart
Webmaster World’s PubCon show makes its first-ever visit to Texas next week, highlighted by a keynote speech from one of the seeds of the Apple Macintosh, Guy Kawasaki. The Austin event, scheduled for March 11-13, also features a wide variety of breakout sessions and other opportunities for brain-picking and hob-nobbing with your publishing peers. Register by the end of the day today for a $100 discount.

— Jeff Hecox

A.H. Belo makes $1.2 Million from 2008 behavioral targeting tests

You may recall that when we announced our APT advertising platform last year, we said that the first customers to use it were members of our Newspaper Consortium. Well, the Newspaper Consortium is now seeing early successes.  For example, A. H. Belo, the first holding company to have all of its papers on APT, said in its recent earnings call that its partnership with Yahoo! has been one of its financial bright spots.

CEO Robert Decherd didn’t give revenue projections for APT, but said A. H. Belo had made $1.2 million last year beta testing Yahoo!’s behavioral targeting and saw auto ad revenues rise for the Dallas Morning News. In his words:

 ”You’re going to have three newspapers using this tool on our sites, but I don’t want to leave you with the impression that the $1.2 million is the most we expect to realize out of this deal. That was mostly one paper and was a test. We’ve now got APT at all our papers and we’ve got the ability, thanks to Yahoo, to sell behaviorally targeted ads on our own sites. This will make a significant difference for us this year.”

For more information about APT, visit apt.yahoo.com.

— The Team

…and other tales from the blogosphere

Ever feel like you’ve missed an opportunity? If you’re a blogger, you don’t want to miss out on capitalizing on a popular blog post, as Jennifer Slegg points out in her excellent post, Springboard off of a successful blog entry. Her advice boils down to a couple of main points:

• They liked your post? Write more like it. (It’s so simple, when you think about it.)
• Find a reason to link to the people who linked to your post, both as a way to repay their generosity and to establish a relationship that can get you added to their blogroll.

For advice on making social media marketing work for you, we looked at Lee Odden’s interview of Dave Evans, author of Social Media Marketing an Hour a Day. Despite the seemingly freewheeling nature of social media, Evans says that it’s important to measure social media campaigns—and, because it’s digital, that it’s not that hard to do.

We’re all about the books this week. Dave Bollier, editor of onthecommons.org, has written Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, which details the rise of open-source software and Creative Commons licenses. “Viral spiral” is the term Bollier uses to describe “the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools.” We like that Bollier practices what he preaches. You can buy a hard copy of his work, or you can download it for free.

Our colleagues at Flickr are embarking on their own social experiment, and they’d like you to take part. To celebrate the launch last year of Flickr video—and the Flickrverse in general—they’re about to launch the Flickr Clock, which will display video taken every hour of the day. “As more members participate, we’ll have the opportunity to experience what a moment in time looks like from a diversity of perspectives,” they say. You can upload your own video to the Flickr Clock Group, and tag it with the time that it was shot.

Finally, have you wondered if the celebrities posting questions in Yahoo! Answers were real, and not, say, Halibut21 under a different guise? The Answers blog says you can tell by their “official” badge under their icon, which they can only get if they’re the real deal. I don’t have my official badge yet, so you’re just going to have to take my word that I’m real. 

  — Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Various items of interest to the publishing community

The YPN blog staff has been away awhile, celebrating all of the recent holidays (especially Festivus, although I must admit I had a harder time than usual getting the aluminum pole back into the attic). Once we returned to HQ, we came across a few tidbits that we wanted to share with readers. Consider it our belated Festivus gift to you…

Three SEM Tips for Big Media Sites
Erik Dafforn’s article from ClickZ offers three excellent suggestions to help larger content publishers continue their traffic growth, including what they can do to increase visibility and properly utilize the assets they’ve spent years developing. Daffron is the EVP of the Cleveland-based SEO firm Intrapromote, so when he says “Get your content indexed rapidly,” publishers should ask, “How fast?”.

Post-PubCon Report
The Yahoo! Store Blog published a post last week from frequent contributor Rob Snell, the author of Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies. Snell provides a recap of the November PubCon show in Vegas, as well as his entire 77-slide deck on how to make more money from your online store. Whether you’re using a Yahoo! Store or flying solo, his tips are nails and can be applied to any online retail site.

Use Caution When Growing Your Site
From Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge checks in with an article that warns of the perils of rapidly expanding the size of your site to gain search volume from the long tail of search. The pitfalls if you ignore this advice? Poor user experience, lack of incoming links and low rankings from search engines.

Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Outlet
There’s no question we all saw this coming, but now it’s a reality: The Internet has surpassed all other media—except television—as an outlet for national and international news. According to a study conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, 40% of respondents say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the Internet, up from 24% in September 2007. And for the first time, more people say they rely mostly on the Internet for news than on those black-and-white dinosaurs that I used to toss into my customers’ hedges circa 1981.

What Font are You?
Finally, a fun little quiz to close out our round-up. In conjunction with the PBS film “Helvetica,” a program that takes a unique view of post-World War II graphic design, you can take a short personality quiz that purports to find your inner typeface. My font is supposedly “Contrary.” I beg to differ!

Got any grievances you’d like to air as we begin ’09? Feel free to share them in the Comments section below.

— Jeff Hecox

Pre-Thanksgiving news from the blogosphere

It’s Thanksgiving time for Americans, but even if you don’t live in the States, you can still be grateful for a lot of things. Here at the YPN Blog, we’re grateful to have your readership, so we thought we’d share our bounty from the blogosphere.

Holding it together
The Yahoo! Search Blog recently announced the launch of the Yahoo! Glue™ beta in the U.S. Glue topic pages help users get to all the information they want with just one click by “gluing” images, videos, articles and more all on one page. Currently, we’re starting with a limited set of topics, but more will be added over time. According to the folks at the Yahoo! Search Blog, “These pages are built using an algorithm that automatically places the most relevant modules on a page, giving you a visually rich, diverse page all about the topic in which you’re interested.”

eBay joins Yahoo! homepage test
Read, set, bid! Yodel Anecdotal announced that Yahoo! has added an eBay application to the “My Applications” dashboard area. According to the blog, “It will provide an ‘eBay Anywhere’ experience, letting people quickly monitor their eBay buying and selling activities, including checking recent bids or getting reminders about auctions that are about to close. They can also as search for and find new eBay items right from within Yahoo.com.” Read more about it here.

Link journalism gets the readers
Our friends at Publishing 2.0 just posted an interesting article about how link journalism drives page views and engagement. They have a compelling analysis on how some publishers provide many links to keep readers involved. We love links—as you can tell by this piece you’re reading now.

Wired kids in the U.K.
American youth may trail other countries in Internet use. Among 12- to 14-year-olds, says a report by the Center for the Digital Future, 100 percent of British youth use the Internet, followed by Israel at 98 percent. The report says 88 percent of Americans of the same age have access to the Internet. So where are the other 12 percent getting their publishing tips?

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

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

News from the blogosphere for publishers

The election’s over, so it’s time to refocus on some winning tools and services that can help you “change” your site. We also found a tomato that’s far from rotten. Read on…

Building a better blog
Calling all bloggers—the folks at the MyBlogLog Blog recently announced that they are teaming up with Zemanta to make your blogging toolbox more powerful. Zemanta helps you find photos, tags and related links when you’re working on your blog post. Be sure to check out the partnership to bring your blogging to the next level.

Twitter tips
It looks like some major newspapers are finally catching on to the Twitter medium, as reported by the Publishing 2.0 Blog. Newspapers can use Twitter as more than just “another place to dump their content,” says the blog. Instead, “newsrooms should see it as a way to create a whole new dimension of value under their editorial brand.”

The blog also says that many newsrooms are missing a huge point: sharing interesting stuff. “As newsrooms increasingly look to link journalism and news aggregation as a way to create value for their readers, they should look to their Twitter accounts as an easy platform for sharing links.” Read more here.

Top tomato
For the second year in a row, Yahoo! offered a prize to the blogger who mobilized the most readers to donate to DonorsChoose, the charity that lets you directly fulfill wish lists for public school teachers. The Yodel Anecdotal blog recently announced this year’s winner: Sarah Bunting, the blogger behind Tomato Nation. Tomato Nation mobilized 1,162 donors, raising $111,352 and reaching 19,577 kids. Sarah is making good on her promise to tour various Washington D.C. monuments dressed as a tomato while drawing attention to our nation’s public schools.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Publisher-related news and bits from around the blogosphere

As Halloween approaches, we thought we’d compile some news for our publishers, so you can spend more time working on your Halloween costume.

What do you want from me?
A while ago, Yahoo! bought a company called Inquisitor, which makes a cool Safari browser plug-in of the same name. The Inquisitor application, which helps generate auto-completes on search queries and previews results, is now available for Firefox and IE7 and 8 browsers. It can also help to generate more personalized search results. Check out the Yahoo! Search blog for more information.

Any colour you like
Whether you spell it “colors” or “colours,” you now have more options when using different themes and colors to personalize your My Yahoo! page. You can now unleash the true potential of your inner designer and start customizing your page. Check out more information here on how to make your My Yahoo! page more individualistic.

Hey you
Social networking is all the rage these days, and Yahoo! has recently made some upgrades to its user profile application to reflect this trend. The new “universal profile” is still in beta, but it can help you manage your identity, activities, interests and connections across Yahoo!. “Ultimately, our goal is to unify your social experience and connections, not only on Yahoo!, but anywhere you travel across the Web,” says Jim Stoneham, Vice President, Communities, about the new profile format. “Rolling out the new profile today is a just first step, and I look forward to sharing more details with you in the coming months as we ‘light up’ social experiences at Yahoo!”.

The profile enhancement is further, ahem, profiled here.

Have a safe and sane Halloween holiday!

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Photo of Roger Waters performing “Any Colour You Like” courtesy of Eddie Bearman

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

New ads reminds users to give Yahoo! Search a try 

We’ve worked really hard to make Yahoo! Search a better experience, with interesting new features (and interesting names, to boot) in the past year like SearchMonkey and Search BOSS. So, naturally, we want people to know about it.

Tens of millions of users choose Yahoo! Search every day. But, says Raj Gossain, VP of Marketing for Yahoo! Search in a blog post today, “We don’t think that’s enough. So today we’re launching an integrated, nationwide, on- and offline marketing campaign to remind the rest of the world (or at least everyone in the United States) that it’s time to give Yahoo! Search a try.”

The campaign will include radio ads and display ads like the one below.

To hear one of our radio ads, read Raj’s blog post.

– The Team