Rumor: MySpace Swap For Yahoo Stake

Way back in the early 20th Century, legendary bluesman Robert Johnson made a deal with the Devil at a crossroads. The story said Johnson traded his soul for the ability to play guitar better than anyone.

New Yahoo CEO Yang may be at a crossroads only a couple of days into his duties, with Rupert Murdoch playing the role of Ol’ Scratch. The Devil wants 25 percent of Yahoo, in exchange for the social networking website MySpace.

The Times of London thinks the negotiations could be in jeopardy, now that Terry Semel has been deposed from the CEO post at Yahoo. News Corp could throw in other goodies like its gaming network IGN to sweeten the deal.

Another social networking site’s success seems to play a role in this deal. In the report, the Times noted how Murdoch acknowledged to the Wall Street Journal that Facebook, a one-time Yahoo takeover target, has been on the rise.

Yahoo could make a belated entry into social networking, and an opportunity to throw out Google’s ads and search, by taking News Corp up on its MySpace offer. Yang and company just have to decide if it’s worth part of Yahoo’s soul to do so.

Search Engine Journal has reported that visitors, specifically from India, are part of the restricted viewers group. Members at Webmasterworld Forums have experienced a significant drop in their ad revenue. According to one of the members:

My belief is that YPN has simply stopped displaying ads for untargeted countries (or stopped counting them). One of the two sites has a portion of its traffic from India — about enough to account for the report differerence.

According to the Search Engine Journal post, this might be one of the first steps by Yahoo Search Marketing’s new ‘Click Fraud Czar’ Reggie Davis, who is tipped to "hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!’s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues."

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Cody Simms, Sr. Product Manager for Yahoo! Publisher Network identifies four unique motivations for publishers:

Simms says, “The measure of success for all of them, however, is maximizing revenue and increasing traffic.”

Simms iterates that this mentality is common to all sizes of publishers.

Contextual advertising, in a nutshell, is “non-search” advertising. The intent of non-search based pages must somehow be derived from the content of the site.

Ultimately, it all boils down to content. If the page is a comprehensive iPod resource, for example, contextual intent might be the purchase of an iPod.

URLs are starting to get a little more interesting as well, as there are ways to extract some meaning from the keywords in a URL.

Navigation/sitemaps are also a helpful place to showcase context.

Simms also offers this tidbit to developers and SEOs, “I can’t underestimate the importance of doing really clear and concise title tags and headers.”

The article text itself, however, is far and away the most important factor it terms of contextual advertising. Crawling bots struggle with Flash, iFrames, and other methods of multimedia site presentation, which for search purposes should reinforce the focus to optimizing the actual text on the page

According to Simms, one of the best search engine and contextually optimized sites on the web is About.com.

If publishers can master these strategies, the reward is obtaining specific and targeted contextual advertising.

Simms offers a list of “Dos and Don’ts” when it comes to content:

Dos:

Don’ts

URL Tips

Simms concluded his portion of the session by offering the following links for publishers to use as a reference:

http://publisher.yahoo.com/enhance
http://publisher.yahoo.com /contentmatch
http://publisher.yahoo.com /traffic

Tom Pickett from Online Sales and Operations at Google AdSense was next to present. His focus was on the swing in media consumption from traditional outlets to online content, and the resulting opportunities that will result from the paradigm shift.

According to Pickett, the habits of web users are changing. We’re seeing more and more time spent on the Internet. The amount of advertising dollars spent in the online realm, however, is increasing at a much slower pace.

Google doesn’t expect this trend to last, and predicts that ad spending will soon catch up, and as a result, generate a significant amount of money spent on online advertising.

Pickett states, “AdSense has grown dramatically over the last year. We reach over 76% of the Internet population.”

Google’s new ad placement system allows clients to group their specific advertising inventory by channel. The advertiser will be able to search and drill down to find sites by these publisher-defined channels.

Third party developers are developing Google gadgets, which could benefit advertising partners as well by offering potentially attractive add-ons for users that embody a wide variety of subjects.

Pickett comments on Google’s new custom search engine technology, “This allows you to harness the power of Google and use your own expertise to create your own search engine.”

Pickett also suggests that one could create a custom search engine and monetize with AdSense for Search.

AdSense’s API program also allows advertising partners to promote Google products on a pay per action basis.

Pickett predicts a healthy future online video, particular with the monetization possibilities that lie in bundling content and ads together. He notes, “You can expect to see a lot more innovation in this area.”

In closing, Pickett predicts a heavy influx of brand marketing; “We think we’re going to see a lot of shift in dollars from brand advertisers in the next year.”

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Adding to the usual check or balance transfer options (only available to publishers who are also Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers), the enhancement shortens the payment processing cycle to 10 days.

Publishers will also have the option to have tax withholdings automatically deducted from earnings. April earnings will be issued by check.

Another upgrade to the YPN beta is an automated messaging system that alerts recipients of direct deposit when it has been made or if there was some sort of problem making the transaction. Publishers may enjoy not having to wait and wonder.

“And with this change,” writes Jensense, “is something that some publishers will like even more than the direct deposit feature, and that is the fact that YPN will now send their payments on the 25th of the month.

“And with AdSense sending payments by the 30th, this will likely result in YPN publishers receiving their payments before their AdSense payments, if they are using both programs.”

There was plenty of networking with a little food/drink here and there. I think I need to upgrade to a phone with a better camera or just start bringing a camera to conferences so I can take more/better quality photos.

Matt Cutts was there for a little while before flying back to CA. As always Matt was talking to a group of webmasters answering questions. As a company frontman to the webmaster community, Matt’s a really good choice. He’s obviously very intelligent but also very friendly to everyone and approachable. He acknowledged getting the questions I sent him about user and toolbar data, so hopefully he’ll have time to answer those. A lot of people would like to get some clarification from Google on the use or non-use of that kind of information.

I ran into many more great people from the search marketing community and it was a good to do some catching up. Tempting as it was, I did not make it over to the Berkman Group meeting over at Harvard that Amanda Watlington invited me (and others) to. Too much work had built up over the past 3 days conference and if I didn’t tackle it Thursday night, I’d be working all weekend.

Here are links from coverage on the WebmasterWorld 2006 Boston Pubcon conference:

Online Marketing Blog

Malcolm Gladwell
Blogs, RSS and Podcasts
YPN Party
Pubcon Boston Day 2

WebProNews

Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters
Link Building Clinic
Link Building Campaigns
Super Bloggers of Search
Blogs, RSS and Podcasts (my stuff published at WPN)
Malcolm Gladwell Pubcon Keynote (my stuff published at WPN)
YPN Party (my stuff published at WPN)

Search Engine Lowdown:

“The Super Bloggers of Search”
Optimizing for ENORMOUS Clients
Blogging, Podcasting and RSS feeds

Matt Cutts:

Boston Pubcon 2006, Day 1

Marshall Sponder

Malcolm Gladwell Keynote
Super Bloggers of Search
Google Sponsored Lunch
RSS, Blogs and Podcasts 1
Leading Brand – Leading Site – Marketing Magic
Conversion Tweaking
PPC 101

Vinny Lingham

PPC Engines and Programs
Malcolm Gladwell Keynote
Contextual Programs
Super Bloggers of Search
Leading Brand Leading Site

The next WebmasterWorld Pubcon conference is the big one held in Las Vegas November 14-17. I’ve been invited to speak again so I’ll see you there.

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

Partying With Yahoo

Ed’s note: In this post, Lee provides us with some details of Yahoo’s big Pubcon party that took place Tuesday evening. Check out what went on and share any comments at WebProWorld.

LOTS of great conversations at this party. Thomas and I got there around 7pm and it was a nice, cozy little event with an open bar, (extended to 10pm) and a wide variety of hors d’oeuvres. Many familiar faces too: Todd Malicoat, the super cool guys from BOTW.org, Mike McDonald of iEntry (and WebProNews.com) and Jeremy Zawodny, my co-presenters for this morning’s PR session Robin Liss and Lawrence Coburn, Brandy and Daron Babin, Roger aka Martinibuster and many others I cannot remember right now because I’m supposed to be practicing my presentation. : )

Unfortunatley, I had a brain cramp when trying to recall Elisabeth Osmeloski’s name when meeting her in person for the first time. Oops. I also finally met Joe Morin in person and checked out the cool pistol grip type, video camera I always see him with.

Tim Mayer from Yahoo gave me some great Boston restaurant suggestions which I promptly wrote down on a napkin. Tim thought it would be fun to invite Matt Cutts to the YPN party and of course, Matt showed up. I spotted him several times drinking loads of Sprite listening to the well-lubricated SEOs tell their tales.

I talked with Matt Curtts earlier in the day with Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans. They were grilling him on user data and Matt was as specific as Matt ever gets – that Google does not use toolbar data for rankings. He mentioned that it certainly didn’t help that in the “Meet the Crawlers” session at SES NYC, the MSN rep suggested that MSN “might” be using user/toolbar info. That suggests the other search engines do as well. Matt also said that user data would be too easy to spam to use for rankings.

Sorry, no photos this time, but there were nifty YPN T-Shirts on the way out.

Thanks for a good event Yahoo.

Lee Odden is President and Founder of
TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog
marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search
marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and
The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs
with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing
expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering
daily news, interviews and best practices.

On a sidenote to this, I have heard direct reports from other publishers that YPN is providing a solid 200% revenue comparison, in some markets, compared to Google’s AdSense. Which, if this is accurate, is one sure-fire way to take market share pretty significantly away from Google, though at an obviously greater expense.

It’s nice to see competition for the independent (and maybe not-so-independent) publishers out there.

Thanks Cindy!

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

A recent study by Nature Magazine, shows that Wikipedia is actually fairly close in accuracy to the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

A ZDNet blog post states that “The study found both had an equal number of what were called “serious errors,” while Wikipedia had somewhat more modest errors.”

Additionally, it seems that Wikipedia has recently begun a donations effort in order to continue operations as a free resource, and aims to be the PBS of the Web.

There have been arguments that all they would need to do would be to insert some contextual advertising (AdSense, YPN), but I think that defeats the purpose of being a more purist non-profit organization, steering away from helping another company profit from its business.

Might not be a bad opportunity for a significant donation from Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc. Or what if Google/Yahoo! allowed them to display their ads, and gave them 100% of the earnings?

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Publishers can choose two categories of ads to target per website/page/directory. This doesn’t mean contextual ads won’t be served – rather YPN explains:

Your ad category selections, in combination with our matching technology, will determine what types of ads will be displayed. Selecting ad categories for a Targeted URL, however, does not guarantee that only ads from those ad categories will appear.’

There are 20 categories with 134 sub categories to choose from (they seem open to suggestions for new categories).

This is a distinct feature of YPN and is very attractive to bloggers targeting niche topics. While I don’t know all the details of how to implement it as I’m not in the beta test still (not unless I’m willing to move continents) I can see some great possibilities with this. For example being able to target different categories on your blog would definitely be handy!

I’ll be interested to see what Google comes up with in this area. They already have the ability to target specific sections of your page for making your ads more contextual – but I’m pretty sure from talking to a few other publishers that they are also testing something similar to this feature. Time will tell.

There is more information on YPN’s category targeting at the YPN FAQ page.

Reader Comments…

Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.

Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.

It’s well worth a read as it reveals that both YPN and Adsense have some clear advantages over one another.

If it’s high click values that you’re after it seems that YPN is your best bet – however if it’s CTR, ePCM or ad relevancy you’ll probably lean toward Adsense. Of course it’s very early days for YPN – without a doubt they’ll be working on issues of relevancy and CTR – if they can it could be well worth the switch when they come out of beta.

Check out her full post for all the details.

In related news – I’ve noticed that in the last few days quite a few bloggers have been accepted into the YPN beta test. It looks like they’ve opened things up to a second round of testers which is a sign that it is a step closer to full release. Still no non North American testers though as far as I can see.

Darren Rowse is the founder of ProBlogger.net, a blog about the many ways of adding an income stream to blogs.

Darren owns and writes a variety of blogs including Digital Photography Blog and Camera Phone
Zone. He is also a co-founder of the Breaking News Blog Collective.