Even though you’ve probably seen their ads for awhile on a few select sites, the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) wasn’t officially announced until yesterday. About the only thing you can do right now is sign up to be considered for their beta program. Welcome to yet another “beta” 🙂
The obvious target here is Google AdSense, which hasn’t had any significant competition. It will be interesting to see what kind of terms Yahoo! puts on this. Will Yahoo! allow me to show pages with both YPN and AdSense ads? Will I be required to keep quiet about my YPN performance? Either way, will any of this prod Google into changing their terms of service?
Assuming that YPN is able to quickly catch up with AdSense, what will Google do to raise the bar? Perhaps they’ll start offering some sort of basic Urchin report ala Stat Counter?