|
 For
the past four years, Google has been the undisputed leader
in search. Its rivals, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves have spent
the past few years working to narrow the vast technological
and popularity gap between them and the great Google. It has
been a long and hard fought series of skirmishes and battles
but this week, two of the three, Yahoo! and Ask
Jeeves, signaled they might be getting closer.
In June 2003, Google made one of the wildest moves in the
history of the Internet by innovating on the paid-advertising
idea originally conceived by Overture. Already the most popular
tool among search engine users, Google gave website publishers
a revenue generating gift that kept on giving. Google's
great PPC innovation was to permit AdWords advertising to
appear on private websites, splitting the click-through fees
50/50 with the private webmasters whose sites delivered traffic.
By giving private webmasters the opportunity to generate incidental
revenues by acting as billboards for AdWords, Google saw profits
from AdWords skyrocket while Internet users became conditioned
to accept the small and unobtrusive ads.
The paid-search advertising market is worth billions and
is expected to be worth tens of billions in a few years time.
Yahoo! is betting that market will support a growing network
of small to medium sized online publishers who will in turn
bring more revenues to Yahoo!. Google, which generates over
90% of its enormous revenues from the AdWords program, might
face serious competition from Yahoo!, which currently receives
about 60% of revenues from paid-advertising.
This week, Yahoo! released a beta-test version of a similar
program known as the Yahoo! Publisher Network or YPN. Open
to a limited number of testers, including StepForth News,
the YPN is meant to compete directly with Google's AdWords
program. The beta is open, for the most part to US based users
only. StepForth is fortunate to be among the few non-US based
beta testers.
Yahoo! has had two long years to study the AdSense model
and appear to have adopted a unique publisher-focused philosophy
offering small and medium sized publishers access to syndicated
Yahoo! products and services in a bid to brand Yahoo! content
as well as Yahoo! generated paid-advertising. In other words,
Yahoo! is not only serving paid-ads to webmasters, it is also
helping them bulk site content with Yahoo! products such as
search, shopping, travel, RSS, user-option personalization
featured, and eventually, Yahoo! syndicated music and video
services.
"Yahoo! has developed many highly successful relationships
with web publishers around the world, and is building on those
experiences to bring new revenue sources and compelling content
to even more high quality sites," said Bill Demas, senior
vice president, Yahoo! Partner Solutions group. "By
helping the broader publishing community maximize the value
of their sites, we aim to create an even more rewarding Internet
experience for publishers, advertisers and users."
Much like AdWords, YPN will be a revenue generator for webmasters
by delivering advertisements that match the topic of the document
they are placed on. The Content Match™ feature enables
publishers to place Yahoo!'s contextually-relevant listings
on their sites and receive a share of the revenue generated
by them. For example, ads that might appear in future editions
of the StepForth Newsletter would likely be about search engines,
search marketing, blogs, and/or tools for SEOs and website
designers. Contextually driven advertising is cool but, profitable
as it is, PPC is not the full story behind the YPN.
The Internet is the backbone network of global communications.
Currently facilitating shopping, travel bookings, entertainment
and instant-research, the Internet has supplanted traditional
tools such as television and radio because it can easily mimic
both mediums while simultaneously performing a number of other
functions. Users interface with the Internet via documents
that are, for the most part, created and posted by small to
medium sized publishers. Yahoo! has adopted a publisher focused
outlook and is looking to place its brand on information and
entertainment content offered (eventually) on tens of millions
of websites.
As publishers from every medium understand, the key to success
is in keeping a captivated audience. One of the more interesting
features of the YPN will be access to Y!Q,
a context-driven search tool which is also in beta-test. Y!Q
is a Yahoo! search application that uses the topic of the
document it is embedded in or a trigger-word set by the webmaster
to present search results in a transparent overlay. The results
shown in the overlay consist of images, two news stories,
and the first three organic search listings. The logic is
site users will stay on a document instead of opening another
search window and traveling away from the site. Y!Q is an
open-beta. Webmasters interested in using Y!Q on their sites
should refer to the Y!Q
for publishers page.
Other integrated features in the beta include, Add to My
Yahoo and Yahoo Maps, showing an inclination towards local,
mobile and personalized search results.
"Add
to My Yahoo!" will help webmasters and publishers
find their way onto user monitors and personalized search
results via the Yahoo! branded RSS feed and subscription service.
RSS stands for really simple syndication and is basically
a XML feed that delivers fresh content to people who subscribe
to it. As with Y!Q, Add to My Yahoo! is already available
for webmasters and publishers.
The inclusion of Yahoo!
Maps shows Yahoo!'s understanding that user or webmaster
generated maps are extremely important for local and mobile
search users. Yahoo! has recently introduced an API
for Yahoo! maps allowing webmasters to place geographic information
on Yahoo! generated maps.
Yahoo! timed the release of the YPN beta to coincide with
next week's Search Engine Strategies Conference in San
Jose. As beta testers, we will be using some of these features
in future editions.
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Search Engine Placement Inc." |
Ask
Jeeves introduces Paid-Placement AdNetwork