Waxy.org things they’ve stumbled upon a new Contextual Ads program from Yahoo for small publishers. They write:
‘Ken Rudman is a product manager at Yahoo-owned Overture, and his blog features contextual Overture ads throughout. His homepage shows the vertical two-ad format, monthly archives show a three-ad horizontal format, and individual entries show another variation of the horizontal format. The ads have decent relevancy, especially considering its early state.
The Javascript that generates the ad IFrame is hosted on Overture’s server. The domain name refers to ypn, which might be an acronym for the ad program… Yahoo Publishing Network, maybe?’
As mentioned on the post it doesn’t seem that the ads are overly relevant now – however in time I’d suspect that more advertisers would come on board and relevancy will improve.
Interestingly the version they are testing has a hover feature – when you hover your curser over the ad you get a little pop up box that tells you more about it. I’m not a big fan of the design options being used on the example above but I’m sure a final version will be pretty customizable. I’ll be watching on with interest to see how this story develops.
