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Yahoo! Publisher Network

Understanding the Ups and DownsAugust 11

Five reasons your revenue could be fluctuating

The famous Roman philosopher Seneca once said, “It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”

While he couldn’t fathom the realities of today’s Internet society, he still had the right idea — “hard work will pay off” — and with Yahoo! Publisher Network, the same holds true.

Our publishers often ask why their revenue is fluctuating. Many times, upon investigating, we find that the publishers themselves have made a slight change to their websites, or they’ve modified their marketing techniques. Either of these can cause revenue amounts to change.

To help you have success with your Yahoo! Publisher Network account, we put together five of the most common factors that may impact your revenue.

Pricing discounts for traffic quality 
Publishers should strive to host content that is unique and updated frequently. Good content will help drive repeat users back to your site, and with pricing discounts in place for our Sponsored Search advertisers, publishers could potentially see differences in their revenue when their quality varies. Clicks from low-quality traffic sources may be discounted to ensure that advertisers are paying an appropriate amount based on the value of the click.

The categories you target 
While we advise publishers to target specific ad ca

Free Images, Good Habits and Mapping your PeepsJuly 17

Selected publisher-related tidbits from the blogosphere

Are you a publisher who is constantly looking for the right image to post on your site? Well, we may not know what the best image is, but we can steer you to some free ones. The folks on the Flickr blog recently announced that Flickr is teaming up with Getty Images to create a collection of royalty-free, rights-ready and rights-managed photographs.

“Team Flickr has long wanted to create a way to make it easier for those who use photos as a part of their daily business to do so in a way that respects the talent and rights of our members,” say our Flickr colleagues on their blog. They also created helpful FAQs about the royalty-free collection and how to use it.

7 Habits of Highly Effective Publishers
Rebecca Sullivan on the RightMedia Blog recently posted some tips for effective publishing. “I have helped publishers from dozens of countries, with very different backgrounds, and with very different sites, and I’ve learned one thing: they’re not that different after all,” Sullivan writes. “There are some behaviors that are shared by many of our most successful publishers, so I’d like to present you with some of their best ideas

Starting widgets, rocking out and staying connectedJuly 1

The latest round-up of articles from the blogosphere

Are you the sharing type? Well, one of the best ways to share your ideas and content is with widgets. And you wouldn’t be alone — marketers and publishers are expected to spend about $40 million on web widgets this year, according to the Marketing Vox news site. Marketing Vox recently published a beginner’s guide to widgets, which are anything that can be embedded in an HTML web page. “One of the best things about widgets,” according to the piece, “is that you can enable sharing. Sharing widgets means more mashing of your ideas and content.”

Like music and chatting with your friends online? The Next* blog announced a new IMVironment that lets you do both. This new release enables you to keep chatting with your friends on Yahoo! Instant Messenger while listening to tunes from popular mp3 blogs. You can save the songs you like on a playlist and send your “remix” to your friend over IM, so they rock out too. 

O’ this social media world! There are so many nifty social media sites out there that it gets a little confusing as to how to keep connected. If you’re a publisher who uses several social media sites, you’ll be interested in this:

What Not to DoJune 25

Five guidelines to help keep you in YPN compliance

When reviewing YPN publisher sites for guideline compliance, I see the same “problem areas” over and over that prevent sites from passing the guidelines. Here are a few things to avoid in order to keep your site in compliance with YPN.

1. Competing Ads
Be sure that Yahoo! ads do not appear on the same page as contextual ads from other companies. It’s okay to rotate these ads along with Yahoo! ads as long as they don’t appear at the same time.

2. Unsupported Languages
Pages where YPN ads appear must be in either English or Spanish. Some publishers may manage quite a few web pages, and may only have a few pages in unsupported languages. It’s important to identify these pages and remove them.

3. Ad Targeting
When choosing to target ads, make sure that these ads actually match the content of the page. For example, the best quality traffic for a page about classic cars will probably result from auto-related advertisements rather than medical product ads or real estate ads.

4. Excessive Ad Units
We don’t allow more than three YPN ad units (the box containing the ads) on the page. Don’t clutter your page with too many ads. 

5. Page Functionality
To ensure a good user experience for our users, we require that the back button be functional, and that the page does not spawn any more than one partial pop-up/pop-under window.

Hopefully, these ti

Seeking ApprovalMay 23

How to get approved on Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange

Yahoo! has a lot of different ways to work with our publishers. One of these, Right Media’s Direct Media Exchange (DMX), is a free web application that allows publishers to auction their ad inventory. 

In a new Right Media blog post, new Right Media blogger Kelly Kitchel posts an interview with, um, Kelly Kitchel about getting approved for DMX. Given that you might want to use DMX—and that some of the concepts of approval are useful in general—here’s an excerpt:

“So imagine that you’ve just created a smoking hot website. The next thing you could do is submit your new website to different advertising partners to be part of their programs. Then you can generate some revenue from your hard-earned, organically grown traffic.

“But then the reality of the approval process sets in. Sometimes you’re accepted. Sometimes you wait forever—and then get accepted. And sometimes you’re just outright denied. How do you make it easier on yourself (and the approvers)?”

Well, for starters, a big DMX guideline is “Be clean and professional in design with quality content.” That means make sure your content doesn’t make any copyright violations and that it’s not also a messy page with too many ads and no original content.

For more, you can