AdMoolah News and Views

Search Engine Journal has published an article outlining YPN’s growth plans for the spring. I will go through the main points made in the article and comment on each one.

1. Improvements in Relevance : The ads that are shown by YPN are based upon what Yahoo calls its ‘matching expert’s. These ‘experts’ will be expanded to include :
* Contextual Engine : Targeting based upon the content of the page
* Ad Targeting : Publishers can “tag” their own site by defining their ad targeting category in the YPN admin
* User Data : Behavioral targeting or profiling (geographic & demographic)

This sounds exciting. Tagging sites is something AdSense users have been asking about for a long time. Premium AdSense publishers are allowed to do this currently.

The behavioral targeting or profiling is something that MSN has plans to do with its AdCenter. It will be interesting to see how well this works and if Google will eventually use this is well.

2. Wire Service : Offering publishers payment via direct deposit this Spring

This is good news and is something that AdSense currently offers. It will be nice to get the payments into the bank faster.

3. Expanding Invitations : Continuing on reviewing and approving thousands of high quality web publishers

4. International Rollout : Global expansion beyond the United States to English and non-English speaking countries

Publisher who have been waiting will be happy with this.

5. Yahoo Search Box : Publishers can add Yahoo Search to their site which will pay publishers a percentage of sponsored search revenue

Again, something that AdSense already has and YPN will be adding. Good to see.

6. Integration into Yahoo Answers : Yahoo may be offering its registered users the ability to earn revenue or points for contributing to Yahoo Answers and other user generated content offerings.

This is a fairly innovative step. JenSense has a good post on this.

Overall its good to see that YPN is moving forward with rolling out new features. With AdSense, YPN and AdCenter all competing, things should keep getting better for publishers.