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January 10, 2006

Yahoo Publisher Ads Are Up

Just got an email from Yahoo today inviting me to the Yahoo Publisher Network, so I though I'd give it a shot. Pretty easy to set up, and very similar to AdSense. If you don't feel like reading their entire FAQ, here's copied and slightly modified breakdown of the key features:

General Points

At this time, the beta version of Yahoo! Publisher Network is only available to publishers within the United States.

Like AdSense, there's a large number of ad sizes available, including many different skyscraper, banner, and leaderboard styles, and you can customize as many ad layouts as you wish, specifying a color palette and ad unit size to complement each page layout.

You are allowed to display ads in multiple areas of your web page(s). In order to do so, paste the code multiple times as appropriate for your page. Keep in mind that the same set of ads may appear in each of the areas that you have chosen to display ads.

Although you are only allowed to have one account, you may use this account to manage multiple websites on which you would like to display ads.

RSS Feed Ads

Ads for RSS feeds are also available. The RSS Ad code is specifically designed to work within your RSS feed template. If you try to use the RSS ad code on your web site or vice versa, you will not be able to display ads on your web site or RSS feed.

Ads in RSS is compatible with either Movable Type or WordPress, and a detailed Ads in RSS Setup Guide is provided for each.

At this time, you cannot customize the appearance of RSS Ads. The RSS Ad Unit should appear at the end of every post.

I can see them showing up in my Bloglines feed. They appear at the end of most, but not all, posts, and look like the following:

Ad Targeting

YPN also uses something called Ad Targeting, which allows you to specify the types of ads that you believe your visitors will find most appealing. You can choose up to two ad categories to apply to your web site, a specific directory of your web site or a content-specific web page on your site. You may choose up to two ad categories per Targeted URL, up to a maximum of 50 Targeted URLs.

If you just choose ad targeting for the entire domain, then the categories selected for the domain will be applied to all of the domain's web pages. However, if you select ad categories for a page and for the directory that the page resides in, the ad category for the page will be used.

Your ad category selections, in combination with Yahoo's contextually-matching technology, will determine what types of ads will be displayed. 20 ad categories are available, along with 109 ad subcategories. If you do not select any ad categories, you will receive contextually-matched ads based on the content of your web site.

URL Blocking

Ad blocking allows you to specify up to 200 domains whose ads you wish to prevent from appearing on your site.

Payment Options

Yahoo offers a payment transfer option, in which publishers may transfer funds from their Yahoo! Publisher Network available balance into their Sponsored Search or Local Sponsored Search account at any time.

Right now I've got them running on the main page, beneath each post. That looks a bit cluttered, especially for short posts, so I'll probably change that. I'd like to just show it after the first post, or every fourth post, but my Movable Type hacking skills are not up to speed, so that will have to wait a bit. I've also got them running on each individual archive page, and in some of my RSS feeds.

Update:Solved the "ads after each post" problem. Here's how you add a banner ONLY after the first post in Movable Type.

The only thing I don't care for are the somewhat slow load time, which causes my pages to load in a jerky, disjointed fashion. They might need to allocate a few more servers to this program. I could also use a few more ad sizes. The 728x90 leaderboard I'm using is a bit big, but the smaller banners truncate the ads to fit, which results in mostly nonsensical, incomplete ads.

Those issues aside, I like it, and it's nice to have an option to AdSense should you want/need it.

It's still in beta, so if you want to sign up for an invite, you can do so here.


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