There is a good, 5 question interview over at Search Views with David Zito of Yahoo’s Publisher Network where he talks a little about YPN’s beta test. The last question has be a little curious:
‘5. You were recently quoted in the WSJ as saying that Yahoo will eventually provide content and ads to YPN partner sites. Can you tell us anything more?
I wish I could tell you more but our PR team would not be happy with me. What I can say is that Yahoo! is the only portal that offers such a broad array of content like – shopping, travel, music, reviews, video feeds, etc. We are excited about the opportunity to offer publishers access to this type of content, which in turn will make for a more compelling user experience for their users. I’ll be sure to let you know when we do start to offer these things.’
Yahoo will provide content to partner publishers as well as the ads to go on them…. wonder if he’s talking about offering their RSS feeds on other sites – or something else…
Actually I believe it’s really interesting. They already have/own the content. And obviously they need the more page impressions they can get their hands on (to display their ads, obviously). So ‘giving away’ their content I believe it’s a clever idea, but a risky one.
Clever: becase it’ll be much easier for a regular guy to have his/her own website/blog. Then, after the person has his site, he needs traffic. Yahoo Ads could be an option.
Risky: leaving aside considering the fact of content ownership, it’s risky because as we all know content is king. They could start creating new content moguls that could display…google ads.
Bottom line, as an online content producer, i like the idea very much.
Somewhere there’s a post about how much more YPN pays its publishers for ad clicks. Tis a lot! I’m waiting for a UK trial…