DoctoRevenue

YPN blog content now to appear on the Yahoo! Advertising blog

As you probably already know, our self-service publisher program, the Yahoo! Publisher Network Online (YPNO) was closed effective April 30, 2010.

Accordingly, the YPN blog—this blog—will be shut down in about a week.

The most pertinent content over the last four years has already been shifted to the Yahoo! Advertising blog. You can find it under the Publisher tab. After we shut the YPN blog down the YPNblog.com URL will automatically redirect to the Yahoo! Advertising blog,

Since our very first post, the YPN blog’s authors and editors have strived to serve the interests not just of Yahoo! Publisher Network partners but publishers everywhere, with helpful tips and tricks on how you can be better and more profitable at what you do. And we will continue to serve your interests on the Yahoo! Advertising blog. (And let’s face it, the line between publishers and advertisers is disappearing, so it makes sense to treat both in a single space.)

After the YPN blog is closed down and the URL redirected to the Yahoo! Advertising blog, publishers wanting look back at our content will be able to do so from a link on the Yahoo! Advertising blog Publisher page.

To all of our publishers and partners, past and present, we wish peace, love and sock monkeys!

— The Team

Yahoo! account managers will contact our partners in the coming weeks

As we shared in February, Yahoo! and Microsoft have formed a search alliance that we believe will help provide more rapid innovation and better monetization to our partners. Innovating search and search advertising is essential to Yahoo!’s strategy and will help deliver more value to partners like you.

Over the last several months, we’ve been working closely with Microsoft to develop a high-quality transition experience for our partners. While there’s nothing you need to do at this time, we did want to let you know that your Yahoo! account manager will be in touch in the coming weeks to provide you with a detailed overview and to answer any questions that you may have.

Transition timing
Our priority is to make this transition as seamless as possible for you. We know how important the holiday selling season is to both our advertisers and partners. That’s why our aim is to complete the transition in the U.S. and Canada before the start of the 2010 holiday season.

Next steps and resources
Please note there are several resources to help you stay up to date on the transition:

Transition Center – The Yahoo! Transition Center includes articles, downloadable materials.
YPN Blog – The Yahoo! Publisher Network blog will post regularly about the transition.
Updates – We’ll send you updates via email, and your account managers will reach out to you directly, so you won’t miss a thing.

We are committed to making this transition as seamless and beneficial for you as possible. We appreciate your business, and look forward to bringing you the benefits of the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance.

— The Team

Decision does not affect large, direct publishers and partners, nor advertisers using Content Match

Earlier today, Yahoo! emailed a small group of publishers participating in the Yahoo! Publisher Network self-service beta program (also known as “YPNO” or “Yahoo Publisher Network Online”), to inform them that we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. This only affects our self-service platform for small publishers who syndicate our Content Match (contextual) listings.

No change for large partners/affiliate network
This decision does not affect nor impact our relationship with large direct publishers and partners in any way. As Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has stated previously, our publisher (or affiliate) network is an important part of our business, and Yahoo! will continue to invest and innovate to ensure that our publishers realize the best value possible from our partnership.

No change to Content Match ads
Publishers participating in the self-service beta program displayed our advertisers’ Content Match ads (or text-based ads), but this made up only a small amount of total impression volume. Advertisers’ Content Match ads will continue to be displayed on our large, direct partners’ sites, as well as across relevant content on Yahoo! sites. Sponsored Search ads are not affected by this announcement at all.

Publishers with questions regarding this announcement are welcome to contact us through the YPN portal.

— The Team

New Huffington Post YAP app shows the value of Yahoo! OpenID

When it comes to online news innovation, you’ve got to love the “HuffPost,” as the influential news and commentary site’s followers like to call it. The HuffPost (a.k.a., The Huffington Post) just introduced a new app that lets users read top HuffPo articles without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage.

With this groovy little widget, it now takes just one click to scan the most popular HuffPo stories, preview what’s latest from its bloggers, and flip through the dozens of sections. It’s impossible to do that without several articles grabbing your attention and inspiring you to comment.

“I’m excited about the new app we’ve developed for Yahoo!” says the HuffPo’s founder and political activist, Arianna Huffington. “Over 260 million people use Yahoo! email accounts and 550 million people visit Yahoo! every month—and now they can keep up with The Huffington Post without having to leave their Yahoo! homepage, simply by adding our new app.”

Yahoo! OpenID opens up a world of social media to promote your brand
Once your thoughts have been provoked, the HuffPost also has you covered there. The site accepts Yahoo! OpenID, a core element of the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) platform. Your regular, familiar Yahoo! sign-in now works on HuffPost Social News and links it all together with Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, and the rest of your online social network—depending on the permission level you set.

Any publisher can have its own app for people to use on the Yahoo! homepage and in their My Yahoo! accounts. It’s officially known as a Yahoo! Application Platform app, but you can refer to it by the much friendlier “YAP app”—Hey, Yahoo! developers do. It’s an open environment, so you can build a YAP app yourself. Any YAP app. There’s no business deal involved, just a straightforward approval process. You can read all about it in the YDN YAP documentation. Creating a YAP app is a smart, cost effective business move for any publication wanting to get its message, its brand, and its advertisers in front of users.

For more on how you can use Yahoo! OpenID and Yahoo!’s social distribution platform on your site to create social media buzz, check out the quickstart guide.

—Chris Marlowe

“You In?” program encourages acts of good during the holiday season

Bob Hope once said, “If you haven’t any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”

Truer words were seldom spoken. At Yahoo!, we strive not only to not be evil, we want to do a little good. That’s why, during this year’s season of sharing, we’ve launched the year-end giving campaign “You In?”.
The campaign, designed to send a cascade of kindness throughout the Yahooniverse and beyond, is an extension of our Yahoo! for Good Purple Acts of Kindness program, and aims to encourage you, the most valuable part of our global community of 600 million, to give back a little of your good fortune through random acts of kindness—and encourages others to do the same.

And without necessarily spending a dime.

Here’s how it works. First, go to kindness.yahoo.com and enter your random act of kindness. You might have dropped off a raincoat at a homeless shelter, or donated a sawbuck to fight breast cancer, or sent a holiday greeting card to a disabled veteran, or simply just remembered to say “happy holidays” to the bus driver. You get the idea.

Once you’ve submitted your act, it will automatically appear on your Yahoo! Status and can be shared on your Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace pages. It will also be displayed on an interactive global map on the campaign’s website at kindness.yahoo.com.

For example, your post might say, “I just helped an elderly person with a walker cross the street. You In?” and provide a link so others can join in and share their own acts of kindness.

So get in, give well and ask others, “You In?” It’s a great way to give Scrooge the what-for during a tough season. To get you in the mood, here are a few more quotes from the great and good:

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”—Mark Twain

“Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.”—Seneca

“The more sympathy you give, the less you need.”—Malcolm S. Forbes

—The Team

(Special thanks to Quote Garden for the inspiring words above; image courtesy Ed Youdon via Flickr, CC 2.0)