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A well-rounded view on search engines and search engine marketing by senior members of the major SEO/SEM forums on the Internet.
- Yahoo Publisher Network Publishers Receive Payments Via PayPal - 2007-06-28 08:27:52-04
Last month, Yahoo added PayPal as a payment option for the Yahoo Publisher Network publishers.
A DigitalPoint Forums thread reports publishers now received the money they earned with Yahoo in their PayPal accounts. The payments were first noticed yesterday, so if you are a publisher and selected the PayPal option, check to see if you received your money.
One member was surprised to see that PayPal did not take a percentage of the payment, like they normally do.
Awesome, just got my payment from paypal! Better yet, paypal didn't take anything out of it! It was the full amount! Very cool! I like the paypal payment now! Very very cool!
The YPN payment page clearly says, "you will not be charged a transaction fee for money deposited to your PayPal account from the Yahoo! Publisher Network program."
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
- Rumor: Microsoft Testing AdSense Like ContentAds with Smaller Publishers - 2007-06-28 08:34:42-04
A DigitalPoint Forums thread has a member saying he has been beta testing the Microsoft alternative to Google's AdSense program, named ContentAds.
He gave the new contextual ad program, from a publisher's perspective, a great review.
To be honest is was actually pretty sweet. I am not going to talk about any specifics until is goes open beta but I feel it is a huge improvement in certain aspects. I am just waiting until I can take it for a spin on some of my websites to really get a feel for it. I wish MS would just give me a job so I can help them step it up some more. For any platform for content publishers you really need to focus on the filtering and reports. Those are the two area I use the most so the most attention should be paid attention to them. A close third of course is the ad creation process. Watch out for MS, they are not going down without a fight.
But as far as I know, ContentAds is only open to very large and trusted publishers and there is no program for smaller publishers. Back in February 2006, I reported that MSN to Release Contextual Ad Program, ContentAds in 2006. That did happen in October 2006 with Microsoft Begins Testing Content Ads Beta, but it was only open to large publishers and to a limited set of adCenter advertisers to opt in. Microsoft continually expanded the ContentAds availability for advertisers but never really expanded the publisher side of things.
In fact, there was a lot of controversy over adCenter advertisers being forced into the contextual program without requesting their ads to show up on the content network. Next time adCenter was upfront about this change, and last week they announced it again.
So is this just a rumor? I am not sure. I sent out emails to my Microsoft contacts in this area, so we will see. I will update you if I find out more information.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
- MySpace Rivals YouTube: A Comparison of Both Services - 2007-06-28 10:52:35-04
A WebmasterWorld thread points us to a Telegraph.co.uk article that says that MySpace intends to launch a rival to YouTube allowing for video sharing. The new product, dubbed MySpaceTV, allows users who are not members of MySpace to share and watch professional, rather than user-generated, video.As an example, here's a movie trailer for Behind the Mask:
All viewers have the ability to share the URL and embed the movie into their websites. They can also watch the videos in fullscreen mode.
MySpace subscribers, on the other hand, are allowed to vote (Booyah or No Way), participate in the discussion, save the movie to their favorites, utilize the "Email This" feature, bulletin/blog it, or add the videos to their MySpace profile. To access similar videos, users can subscribe to the video channel and be alerted when new videos are posted.
The services are largely similar, with some notable differences.
Both have the same pop dialog box that informs you that you have to log in to perform an operation:
This is how it looks on YouTube:
And MySpace's popup isn't much different:
Once you opt in for a subscription, it is verified. The notable difference here is that YouTube does not show how many users are subscribed to a certain channel, whereas MySpace does:
YouTube:
MySpace:
You can view your subscriptions and browse through them in a similar fashion on both services:
YouTube:
MySpace:
Rating is a little different as well. YouTube's rating system is out of 5 stars. MySpace's rating system is most like Digg -- you can either thumbs up the video or thumbs it down.
YouTube:
MySpace:
The other notable difference is the display of comments. YouTube does not feature user avatars in the comments system, whereas MySpace does. MySpace is already seeing spam posts, but I don't see a way to report them as Spam. YouTube has a Spam link on the page.
YouTube:
MySpace:
Forum members are largely excited and think this is a promising move:
...its nice to see a site become the full package.
Myspace could capture a lot of eyes from youtube if they cater to the music video providers. The video encoding quality is much better on myspace than youtube and the audio is in stereo.
Indeed, the quality of MySpace videos is better than YouTube's. I think that if they continue to focus on professional content, there is a lot of promise for MySpace.
Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.
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