I thought Jen at Jensense was very quiet about Yahoo’s Publishing Network Launch and suspected she must have had the inside word and now it’s clear she did as she’s announced she’s part of YPN’s beta test. I’ll say right up front I’m very jealous as I’ve been trying to get on the beta test group too (I’ve been chatting today with a couple of different Yahoo people) – but to no avail due to not living in the land of opportunity (USA) :-). I guess I’m just geographically challenged.
Jen shares a few of her initial observations of the program. Here are the things that I like the look of:
‘All the obsessive stat checkers will love a feature that YPN has implemented into their control panel. When you login, under the daily balance, it states “* Estimated as of Aug 2, 2005 at 7:45 PM PST” This will give publishers a very definitive look as to what time the stats are current until.’
and
‘Something that is very cool about payment options is that it appears publishers have the option of transfering their YPN earnings over to their Yahoo search marketing account, if they use the same login username for both accounts. This is something AdSense/AdWords customers have requested since the launch of AdSense, so it is nice to see this as a feature YPN is implementing for their publishers.’
Overall YPN doesn’t look as remarkable feature wise as what some had been building it up to be. I guess it’s early days and they don’t want to reveal all their cards to Adsense before it goes live with a wider group later in the year. They will also have some bugs to weed out I guess – it’ll be interesting to watch Jen and other’s experiences.
If you’re in the US you can sign up for the beta here (be quick). Once you do let us all know how you find it!
They are stupid bastards for not allowing some key non US bloggers into this. I would have thought that they’d leap to have you involved Darren. What a stupid move if they are really trying to get bloggers on board with the system not to include the most high profile blogger online who is making a fortune off their main opposition through blogging.
I’m really pissed about this. They could have had 5 months of free publicity through you. You should make them pay and blog about how great Adsense is harder than ever. Stuff yahoo!
It’s ok Randy. Take a deep breath and walk away from the comments :-)
Seriously – I appreciate your kind words but I guess there are logistical issues with including non US residents in the beta. Whilst it might have been smarter to involve more people from different countries I guess they had to draw some lines around it somewhere which would always exclude someone.
I too look forward to the day when these lines are widened to encompass the rest of us but until then we can watch the experience of others and continue to enjoy the quality service that Google offers.
I don’t think we have to make too big a deal about this – afterall most beta tests exclude someone!
I know Yahoo is trying to place catch up to Google in the Search Engine Wars, but what happened to Yahoo being the leader? I personally love google, and all tings about them. They have a very clean design, and they have a do not evil motto. How can you not like them? I am interested in seeing how the publisher network plays out, as it could be a new revenue stream for websites, as well as affiliate publishing (if you are into that thing) I tried signing up for the beta, as I do live in the US. I will have to test it out. I guess I need to start up some more blogs, that are either pro google, or pro yahoo :-)
Personally I’m looking forward to the competition for Google AdSense. In the end this should be good for publishers in terms of program features and hopefully revenue.
In the end I’m hoping this competition will turn into a larger revenue share for publishers. I’m anxiously awaiting news from beta testers.
More competition has to be good, I’m looking forward to the day that google is no longer the only search engine that most people know about.
It will be interesting to see how Yahoo will implement its system in regards to earnings disclosure etc, whether they will stick closely to the google model or diversify.
Jen lives in Canada, not the US.
Looking forward to this!
The real question seems to be why so many not hearing back and when will this beta widen or better yet end.