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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