Selected blogosphere tidbits

Time of the season
As we shift into cooler weather and shorter days, Yodel Anecdotal recently announced that Yahoo! is launching a new calendar. The new web-based application features open standards so you can share your schedule with others, and it’s also built for the mobile platform.

News bits
In the online media landscape, the Associated Press plays an important role in the publishing and news coverage. Often the AP is the first to cover a story, then bloggers pick up on the news piece and run with the story. Publishing 2.0 examines the relationship between the AP and the 21st Century news ecosystem.

Extraordinary ideas
The folks at the Groundswell blog recently published a piece on how ordinary marketers can generate extraordinary ideas. Just because these ideas were written with marketers in mind doesn’t mean that publishers can’t use these tips, too. As the popularity of blogs, social networks and wikis grows, it’s good to learn how to best use these technologies.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

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.

An end of the summer roundup

Ah, the end of the summer… though it’s 90 degrees in Los Angeles and 80 degrees in New York today. But soon the kids will be back to school, the leaves will change colour and folks will break out these strange garments called … sweaters. So, as summer dies down, we thought we’d share this roundup of what’s still hot in the publisher world.

Who’s the boss? You are.
It’s been two months since Yahoo! Launched Yahoo! Search BOSS and so far we’ve seen some great products created with it. Our colleagues at the Yahoo! Search Blog are spotlighting a few folks who have developed on the new product. Be sure to check out some of the interesting products — maybe you’ll be inspired to a product of your own.

Making mobile waves
Mediaweek recently announced that mobile Internet usage is exhibiting healthy growth in 2008. According to a new report issued by mobile technology vendor Crisp Wireless, the total number of mobile web impressions generated by users surged by 29.4 percent in the second quarter of this year versus the previous quarter.

The mobile publishing and marketing industry is still taking its first steps but it’s worthwhile to check out some of the companies. You might want to check out some of the products and services from Yahoo! Mobile.

The politics of punditry
Our friends at Yahoo! Anecdotal recently published a post about the new and improved General Election Political Dashboard for all your folks following the race to the White House. The dashboard is highly interactive, detailed yet completely easy to use.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

How treating a web page like a research paper can help you in search listings

You should always keep your audience in mind when you’re writing landing page text. But what do you when you’re optimizing pages for search engines and your audience isn’t even human?

According to search engine optimization expert Jessica Bowman of SEM Inhouse, it may help to think of search engines as your college professor. Jessica recently gave a workshop at Yahoo! on search engine optimization, and she pointed out that search engines read your web pages an awful lot like professors read a college research paper.

They’re alike? Really?
Before the comparison brings sweaty visions of the worst part of college to your head, it doesn’t mean your web copy should be 20 pages long. In fact, it shouldn’t be anywhere near that. But, Jessica says, professors are like search engines in that they have to read a lot of papers, which means they have to make some of their judgment calls by scanning. These are some of the elements that both look for:

• Title: Both of them need to know at a glance what the document is about.
• Headlines, emphasized words and lists: Anything called out with headlines, bold or italicized words, or bullets is likely to be important. Call headlines in your web copy out with tags like <H1>, <H2> and <H3>.
• Conclusion: A good conclusion restates the theme of the opening paragraph, which drives the argument home for your professor and confirms what your page is about for the search engine.
• Sources cited: Professors like to know that you researched the paper, and search engines like to see that you’re linked to other websites.

How to get on the bad sides of professors and search engines
There are a few of the things that both of them hate:

• Plagiarism: You know that little research paper-buying incident that got your frat brother thrown out junior year? Turns out that search engines don’t like it when you steal other sites’ content either. And given that they’re searching the web, they might notice when 15 copies of something show up.
• Too many quotes: Original thinking is important. Just as you wouldn’t devote most of your research paper to huge quotation blocks, you don’t want to rely too heavily on syndicated content.
• Bad writing: Search engines are more liable to penalize your page in results when you stuff your copy with unrelated keywords, strand important content at the bottom of your page, and rely too much on headlines and lists.

Search engines and professors love…

• Verbosity: You probably realized this about your professor when you had to analyze three paragraphs in Dante’s Inferno for 15 pages. In the search engine world, verbosity means substantial, relevant, wordy, full-length, original content.
• Reinforcing your stance: Just as professors like it when you repeat and back up your claims, you want your main concepts and keywords to be repeated throughout the page.
• Good writing: For a search engine that means variations on your keywords, including different endings. If only your professor’s definition had been that flexible.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nic McPhee

Five reasons your revenue could be fluctuating

The famous Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”

While he couldn’t fathom the realities of today’s Internet society, he still had the right idea — “hard work will pay off” — and with Yahoo! Publisher Network, the same holds true.

Our publishers often ask why their revenue is fluctuating. Many times, upon investigating, we find that the publishers themselves have made a slight change to their websites, or they’ve modified their marketing techniques. Either of these can cause revenue amounts to change.

To help you have success with your Yahoo! Publisher Network account, we put together five of the most common factors that may impact your revenue.

Pricing discounts for traffic quality 
Publishers should strive to host content that is unique and updated frequently. Good content will help drive repeat users back to your site, and with pricing discounts in place for our Sponsored Search advertisers, publishers could potentially see differences in their revenue when their quality varies. Clicks from low-quality traffic sources may be discounted to ensure that advertisers are paying an appropriate amount based on the value of the click.

The categories you target 
While we advise publishers to target specific ad categories for their sites, we generally recommend they select categories that are relevant to the content of their sites. For example, a website about popular vacation spots would probably not display ads about computer software. There may be instances where you may want to run different types of ads — a golf site, for example, might want ads for non-golf items that its readers might buy. But in general, ads that aren’t relevant to the site may result in a decrease in revenue.

The quality of your website 
Remember that the quality of a website plays a big role in generating revenue — you want your site to be a place where users trust your content and are comfortable clicking on the links. We encourage publishers to place their ads on content-rich pages that are well structured and provide for a good user experience.

Where your site is advertised 
One the most important factors affecting publisher revenue is where your site is linked to across the Internet. Listings in search engine results and Sponsored Search ads are widely used to market websites and drive traffic.

But these two methods alone do not guarantee results. For example, search engines constantly change their algorithms and as their search results are constantly changing, as well. A site displayed on the first page of results of a major search engine could suddenly drop in position, and traffic would drop right along with it. It’s vital to frequently monitor your weblogs or use third-party software to identify where the traffic to your site is coming from.

The subject and the season 
This is one of the most overlooked causes for any sort of revenue/impression drops or increases for an account. We often forget that searches and clicks are a direct reflection of what is happening in our society and on the calendar

For example, we received an inquiry from one of our publishers who received a good amount of traffic and clicks in May and June, but suddenly experienced a drastic drop in both impressions and clicks in July. We researched the account and did not find any underlying reasons for this sudden drop, but reviewed his website and discovered that it primarily focused on computers.

The increase in traffic was attributed to graduation season. During May and June, computer sales often rise in conjunction with college and high school graduation ceremonies, hence the increase in people searching for computers to give to graduating students. The mystery of the traffic fluctuation had been solved.

If these five factors don’t explain changes in your revenue, contact your customer service team.

— The Yahoo! Publisher Network Customer Solutions Team

Publisher news bits from the blogosphere

Earlier this week, Yahoo! announced a partnership with HP and Intel to create a “global, multi-datacenter research testbed for the advancement of cloud computing research and education.” What’s cloud computing? Well, we had to look it up, too, but the simple way to describe it is as a way for customers to tap into computing resources that can be anywhere, and only pay for what they use.

“Here at Yahoo!, we believe in open and collaborative research as the best way toward building the next generation of the Web,” says Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research. “As part of our dynamic Academic Relations program, we’re teaming up with academia, as well as other companies and governments across the globe, to invest in and pool together the large-scale computers that will let researchers conduct truly breakthrough work on cloud computing and data storage systems.”

We’ll keep you updated as we learn more about the cloud computing project.

Picnik basket
Are you a big shutterbug, or use a lot of photos from Flickr on your site? The Flickr blog recently announced they are working with the folks at Picnik on a nifty tool. Starting today, you can send a batch of uploaded pictures to Picnik for editing, crop and edit, and then save everything to your photostream.

MyBlogLog overhauled
Calling all bloggers out there: Please report to the new MyBlogLog site and dig their new redesign. The sleek and clean design still has all the features you’ve come to know and love, but check out the New with Me feature, which now runs down the center of the page. Profiles in the past were pretty static, but now they become a dynamic representation of your current activity.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

Selected publisher-related tidbits from the blogosphere

Are you a publisher who is constantly looking for the right image to post on your site? Well, we may not know what the best image is, but we can steer you to some free ones. The folks on the Flickr blog recently announced that Flickr is teaming up with Getty Images to create a collection of royalty-free, rights-ready and rights-managed photographs.

“Team Flickr has long wanted to create a way to make it easier for those who use photos as a part of their daily business to do so in a way that respects the talent and rights of our members,” say our Flickr colleagues on their blog. They also created helpful FAQs about the royalty-free collection and how to use it.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Publishers
Rebecca Sullivan on the RightMedia Blog recently posted some tips for effective publishing. “I have helped publishers from dozens of countries, with very different backgrounds, and with very different sites, and I’ve learned one thing: they’re not that different after all,” Sullivan writes. “There are some behaviors that are shared by many of our most successful publishers, so I’d like to present you with some of their best ideas, so you can use them and maybe even make lots of money.”

Mapping Your Peeps
The Groups Labs team recently launched the People Map Beta. If you’re a Yahoo! Group owner or a moderator, you can map members of your particular group.  They just have to complete a short information form that puts them on the map. You already know where they are in terms of common interests, but now you can see where they are physically.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications

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

A Mid-Summer’s News Catch-Up

Our colleagues at the Right Media Blog recently posted an article about the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and their efforts to broaden the coalition of publishers on the web. According to the IAB’s post “Small Publishers Unite! You Have Nothing To Save But Your Business,” the IAB is trying to “mobilize to stop politicians from unfairly and inappropriately regulating digital advertising.” Check it out for yourself.

Picture This
The Creative Commons Blog posted an article on how to help distinguish between Creative Commons, the public domain and all-rights-reserved images you may use on your site. Recently, some reporters from mainstream newspapers were confused about where certain images fell under, and as a result, there was some trouble. Many publishers use all three types of images, so it might be good for you to review.

Sounding Social
With so many free online radio stations and different music players, it’s a little daunting at times keeping up with the technology. Chris Lindsay of Yahoo!’s The Spark blog does a great job reviewing some of the many social music networks in the article “The Rise of the Social Music Networks.”

Private Matters
Some of you specialty publishers also participate on Yahoo! Groups, and their blog recently posted some tips on what privacy controls you have. It’s great info on how to control who can join your group, who can find your group, or who can see your group messages.

Just the Facts, Please
Many of us routinely use Wikipedia as our main source for facts, definitions and quick answers. A very informative piece in its own right, DistanceDegrees.com’s “Lose Your Wikipedia Crutch: 100 Places to Go for Good Answers Online” opens our eyes to a whole bunch of great places to get answers. Yahoo! Answers is one of the top Question and Answers sites mentioned. Of course, if you’d asked us that, we would have told you.

— Roger Park, Manager, Marketing Communications