The latest news with Yahoo was the induction of their new CEO, Marissa Mayer, which everyone predicted would be a crucial turning point for Yahoo. Well, mixed in with the news of Marissa’s new baby boy, it was recently reported that this turning point may be starting to take shape. It has come in the form of Yahoo’s new partnership with Media.net and Bing to bring back their publisher network. As you can probably recall, Yahoo abandoned their publisher network, which never really left its beta testing stage, back in early 2010 due to insufficient resources to continue the program. Well, Yahoo has just recently decided to bring back its Google Adsense competitor with the help of another one of Google’s rapidly growing competitors, Bing.
Bing, Yahoo and Media.net have gone into this partnership with the idea that they will be able to increase their inventory of contextual advertising resources that they can allow advertisers to use. These ads have already started to appear around the web on Yahoo sites, and those who use Bing Advertising for their display ads will instantly be having their ads shown on Yahoo’s Publisher Network.
With the new network and the new partnership, each of the partners has its own duty. Media.net will be given the task of managing technology, operations regarding business, and publisher relationships. Yahoo will do some of these same things as well, but the company will also be managing network operations, “to adhere to existing quality traffic standards.” Bing will help out with Bing Ads, by combining ads from other, smaller advertisers with the network.
In the announcement made in the Yahoo News Center, the company lays out the key features of the program, which I have included below.
Key Features of the program for publishers include:
- Easy-to-use: Ads can be added to a publisher’s website in minutes using the Media.net powered self-serve platform. Publishers can select an ad size and copy-paste the HTML provided on their web pages to start displaying targeted sponsored links and ad topics.
- Premium advertiser pool: Access to the Yahoo! Bing Network consisting of millions of ads and ad topics.
- Robust targeting: Proprietary Media.net technology scans all the content on web pages and delivers highly relevant ads.
- Customization: Publishers can use the Media.net platform to pick from multiple ad sizes, skin the ads to match their look-and-feel requirements, and even request highly customized ad units.
- Control: Publishers can influence the ad targeting on a web page by providing hints (keywords). Also, unwanted advertisers and ad topics can be easily blocked.
- Dynamic optimization: Ad units consist of sponsored links, ad topics or a combination of both, as determined on an impression-by-impression basis to maximize ad yield.
- Placement flexibility: Publishers can run ad units in tandem with or in place of their current ads.
- Mobile ads: Publishers can choose to display mobile optimized ad units on their web pages to users browsing the site from any iOS (iPhone, iPad and iTouch), Android and Blackberry phone or tablet.
- Real support: Full-time ad specialists from Media.net provide support to publishers. Publishers can interact with a real person to help with performance improvements, optimization and customizations.
The sort of new, sort of old publisher network is Yahoo’s new way to keep up in the marketing world, and to bring another formidable opponent to Google Adsense. It will be hard for Yahoo to compete, but big things could be coming in their future with this revised publisher network.
