Color me curious. I heard about Yahoo! Publisher, and I figured I’d see how it works. I know how AdWords works from both sides—we use AdWords for the flower shop, and I know many of my fellow bloggers make gadget money from the program. But I have to be different.
Yahoo! Publisher is still in beta, but you can sign up at http://publisher.yahoo.com/. It was pretty simple—fill out a form and wait a couple of days. I got my enrollment message today; I completed the registration and inserted my first ads a few minutes ago. Setting up the ads is extremely easy—you pick any of the standard color schemes (or create your own if you’re feeling spunky), choose an ad size, create a reporting category, and copy a small JavaScript. The script was an absolute cinch to insert into the default dasBlog template, and I’ll add ads to the other skins when I get some more time. You can blosk ads from specific domains, and choose category ads to provide more general targeting to your site visitors. You can even insert ads into the RSS feeds, but currently only on Movable Type or WordPress. No big deal since the half banner fits nicely in the ItemTemplate anyway.
In addition to the ads, you can add additional services like Yahoo! Maps, Add To My Yahoo! and Y! Q, which is a contextual search (for instance, if you’re looking at a page about Apple computers, and you search for ‘apple’, results will be slanted to the company and not the fruit or child).
So far, I have to say this is a lot easier than I thought, and I’m going to try not to be annoying as I mess around with the different ad types and templates.
Now playing: Ryan Shupe & The Rubberband – Even Superman