Posted in • Search Engines News • Yahoo • Search Engine Rumors

What do Yahoo’s text ads that’s rumored to be coming soon look like?

I followed the link from Cnet’s article about Yahoo text ads to an alleged Yahoo employee’s site and grabbed this.

Submitted by RL
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Posted in • Search Engines News • Yahoo • Search Engine Rumors

{embed="search-engine/ads"}An interesting item on Cnet about Yahoo to be entering the lucrative text ad serving business for small publishers.

Well it’s only a matter of time before Yahoo launches their own Adsense like text ad serving program for small publishers. Search engines and advertisers all seem to be jumping on the long tail these days.

Google has had the field to themselves for almost two years now. Now that Yahoo/Overture has the advantage of reviewing Adsense over that time let’s hope they can improve on some of Adsense’s shortcomings.

Some things that immediately come to mind.

Smarter Ad Matching

Google is mostly effective for tightly focused sites and pages but seems hopelessly retarded when it comes to long pages that cover a range of topics, like blog home pages. Adsense often places public service announcements in ad spots when it’s confused about the content which means no payout for the publisher. Or in other cases wholly innappropriate ads get tossed onto the page. Yahoo/Overture’s track record when reviewing their ads on larger publishers’ sites has been spotty.

Transparency

Publishers are totally left in the dark when it comes to percentage of revenue payout. How much money from each click is the publisher getting paid? How much did the advertiser pay per click? Google is mum on this. Publishers are dependent on Google’s good graces on paying out a fair percentage. They have the ability to lower the percentage and site owners will have no hard data to call them on. I have inexplicably noticed large dips in payouts on one of my sites recently. Traffic remains consistent, I still show up on main key words but the payout has dropped to about half. Is this what “do no evil” means?

Allowing Competing Ad Networks on Same Page

This is going to be a sticky one. Google currently won’t allow another competing ad network’s text ads on the same page. This from Google’s Adsense eligibility faq.

However, we do not permit Google ads to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads. This would include all content-targeted ads as well as text-based ads. Text-based ads, for this situation, can be loosely defined as ads that mimic Google texts ads or appear to be associated with Google text ads on your site. We do allow affiliate or limited-text links.

Will Yahoo be more open?

Click Fraud

This is an issue that affects the whole industry and everyone involved from the engines, advertisers and publishers. How about this proposal? All the search engines should form a consortium to develope tools and methods for detecting click fraud and share the results among themselves. Otherwise if this issue gets overly problematic advertisers will simply go elsewhere, knocking out a major revenue generator for both the SE’s and publishers alike.

Whatever happens with Yahoo’s entry into text ad serving for small publishers, the initial offshoot will most likely be a boost to it’s stock price and put pressure on Google’s.

Submitted by RL
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