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!
