The announcements today by Google Adsense of new features (see last three posts) seem to have been strategically timed to preempt the launch of Yahoo!’s new contextual ads for small publishers. It seems that Google might be trying to strengthen their relationship with publishers by giving them new payment options and revenue streams (things they’ve been asking for for some time now) in the hope of stopping them switching to whatever Yahoo! offers in the coming weeks and months.
This has got me thinking about what Yahoo! could offer to make Adsense publishers switch to their system and give it a try.
I thought I’d open it up for some discussion. Those of you who use Adsense – what would it take to get you to switch over to Yahoo!’s contextual ad system when its released? What features would you like to see that Adsense doesn’t have? Is it just about earning capacity or are other features important to you? Will you give it a go temporarily to see how it works or would you wait to see what others say about it? interested in your thoughts and ideas.
Besides the obvious ones like higher payment percentage, there would be greater customization of ad formats, the ability to blog certain keywords like ‘blog’ from showing and of course the holy grail would be no ‘Ads by Yahoo’ link on the ads :) …which would make the seemless integration of ads and content complete.
Show me the money!
More money
I would appreciate a more powerful ad reporting application. The ability to see trends in advertisement views/clicks/revenue in as much detail as Urchin shows for web server stats. There are many more ways to show add logs than just by channel/date and such. I’d like the ability to see what time of day, for how long a session, over which pages a user viewed ads.
more transparency of what works and doesn’t, which naturally leads to…
more money!
If they didn’t have Ads by Yahoo! that’d definitely be a plus but ultimately, it’s about the cash. Let’s be honest… advertising is about bottom dollar and everything else is just fluff.
More money and perhaps no branding (i hate the “Ads by Goooogle”).
what about if they gave an option to be paid in part with Adwords ads at a discount? ie instead of a cheque they let you nominate to have all or part of your payment as a credit to spend on Adwords and become an advertiser as well as a publisher….