If
you're not familiar with Adsense or YPN, both programs
allow you to add specialized coding to your website
pages and then display text-based ads which are related
to the content on the page. For example, if you have a
sports related website theme, then ads would be shown
for sporting goods and services
Google
had this market cornered for a long time, but with YPN
there's now some "friendly competition" -- which is a
good thing for everyone involved.
Yahoo's
Publisher Network (YPN) is currently in beta and only
available to publishers in the United States. You can
apply for the program at
http://publisher.yahoo.com. Word on the "Internet
Street" is that Yahoo hopes to be out of beta by the end
of the year and has plans for offering additional
services as well.
Once
accepted into the program (which they're calling
"Content Match"), you'll need to log into the YPN
control panel to select your ad formats and colors.
There are 10 different ad unit sizes to choose from. For
example: Square 250X250, Large Rectangle 336X280, Small
Rectangle 180X150, Banner 468X60, and so on. Most of the
sizes offered are similar to those you'll find on
Google's Adsense.
Customized color schemes can be created for your ad
layout, or you can go with any of the standard ad
colors. You can set background color, text and link
colors.
YPN
offers full reporting and tracking capabilities. You can
track up to 50 channels to find out which pages and ads
are your top performers.
Once
the code is in place on your pages, Yahoo will crawl
your site's content to insure that relevant ads appear.
If no targeted ads are available, public service ads
will be shown.
YPN
gives you a bit of control over competitors' ads showing
up on your site, with the option of blocking up to 200
of them.
In
their efforts to differentiate themselves from Adsense,
YPN is also offering something called "Ad Targeting."
This allows you to choose up to two ad categories for
your entire site, or just for specific pages. This is
done in order to target your visitors with ads based on
their specific interests. This in no way guarantees that
only ads from those categories will be shown; it just
gives Yahoo a better idea of what types of ads you'd
like to see appear on your site.
You can
choose up to two categories per targeted URL, to a
maximum of 50. If you don't see a category that fits
your pages, you can always suggest it be added. There
are currently 20 categories to choose from. For example
"automotive, B2B, computing," with 109 sub categories.
If
you've been showing Google ads on your site for some
time now and are thinking about adding YPN's to increase
your revenue, keep in mind it is against Yahoo's terms
of service to display any other contextual ads on the
same pages as theirs. So if you want to run both
programs on your site you'll have to put one on each
page, or get your hands on a rotation script that will
rotate both ad types, one at a time, on all pages of
your site. One such script can be found at
Shoemoney.
