It’s been a long time coming and today it’s official.
Yahoo has formally announced the beta of their contextual advertising network for small and medium-sized publishers, the Yahoo Publisher Network.
The story first appeared on News.com yesterday, bearing the title “Yahoo to launch blog ad network.” Since then it’s been picked up all over, including this piece on ClickZ as well as this post on the Yahoo! Search Blog.
We’ll post some more detailed thoughts later, but here’s a quick “just the facts”:
- Yahoo is As Google Does. Like AdSense, Yahoo’s product will serve up text ads considered relevant to the content of a specific Web page. Advertisers pay when readers click on their ads, with Yahoo and the publisher splitting the fees.
- Human Touch. Unlike Google’s system, Yahoo will employ human editors in the process of matching ads to content pages.
- A Monopoly at Its End? Yahoo’s new program is being positioned as a direct competitor to Google’s AdSense, encroaching on Google’s monopoly on text ads for small online publishers.
The Jensense blog has a great test run of the beta, with lots of insider commentary. Go check it out.
