Blogging For Money

Just when I was thinking of expanding the usage of this service on all my websites and blogs, Yahoo! just had to drop the bombshell by announcing that they will shut down MyBlogLog starting from 24th May 2011 onwards.

Apart from Delicious and Flickr, MyBlogLog is probably the only service affiliated with Yahoo! that I am using heavily at the moment. Its really a shame that they had to shut down such a great service which allows you to see who had viewed your website or blog. I really do not understand what Yahoo! is up to. Perhaps this is a telling sign that Yahoo! will be going bust anytime soon.

Well this is certainly no April Fool’s joke, seeing that this was widely reported on many tech blogs, including TechCrunch. This has also been confirmed on the YPN Blog. If you are a Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) publisher, you would have received the following e-mail informing you of this decision:

Dear Publisher,

Yahoo! continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services, in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences. After conducting an extensive review of the Yahoo! Publisher network beta program, we have decided to close the program effective April 30, 2010. We expect to deliver final publisher payments for the month ending april 30, 2010 to publishers no later than May 31, 2010. All publishers eligible for 1099s for the 2010 tax year will have those mailed by January 31, 2011.

Because our content will no longer be delivered to your ad unit spaces after April 30, 2010, we recommend removing all YPN ad code from your pages by that date.

This will certainly be a problem for many YPN publishers who are banned from Google AdSense, the stronger competitor of YPN. On my part, I’ve never used it myself but I have been waiting patiently for YPN to come out of beta (even though it has been 5 years) and go international, however remote it was. Looks like this possibility has now become impossible.

(more…)

I still remember when I first came across Yahoo! in 1998. At the time I did not know what search engines were and I did had a hard time finding what I needed. Yahoo! was the search engine of that era (before the rise of the Big G) and I did use it for some time but only sparingly. That is, until they bought over Rocketmail and then Geocities. I then had no choice but was “forced” to use their service.

I came across this screenshot of Yahoo! in 1998. Ah, the nostalgia….

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena. To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service, for example promoting san diego dj service, that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted. Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

(more…)