This Wednesday Yahoo announced that it has decided to close the Yahoo Publisher Network, which was yahoo’s Google adsense counterpart.
If you’re a Yahoo Publisher Network member, chances are you might have received an email notification already stating that Yahoo is about to close down the service on April 30. According to the email, Yahoo is asking YPN members to remove the YPN codes from all of their sites and Yahoo will be paying outstanding YPN revenues by May 31, 2010.
The Yahoo Publisher Network is an advertising platform enabling small Web publishers to place ads on their sites to drive revenue, which is officially closing on April 30. The service had been in beta testing since its launch nearly five years ago.
After a review, Yahoo decided that the resources required to take the program to a more advanced stage would be better used in other parts of its business, Yahoo spokeswoman Kristen Morquecho said on Wednesday.
Yahoo Publisher Network Beta is not to be confused with a similar ad network that Yahoo runs for large publishers, which remains active, nor with Yahoo’s various other services to sell and display ads,
she said…
Now here’s the interesting part. The email being sent to YPN publishers is suggesting that as an alternative to YPN, users who want to continue earning from their sites use Chitika instead. In fact, Chitika has already put up a landing page welcoming YPN publishers. The said page directs those who are coming from the link given by the Yahoo email to various information that will make publishers’ transition from YPN to the Chitika network smoothly.
In fact, probably a month ago Chitika has announced the release of Chitika Select for non search engine traffic! May be they have planned this migration! What ever it is, it is quite obvious now that Chitika will be getting some publishers from YPN. Do you think that it was Yahoo’s plan to join Google Adsense’ biggest rival?
Publisher Network joins the increasing list of services that Yahoo has shut down for not making strong financial sense. One of the more notable examples occurred last April, when the company announced that it would be shutting down GeoCities which was officially discontinued in October.
