What Can Yahoo Do To Compete with Google?

ryanjensen writes "Jay Currie over at Tech Central Station has an article up about Yahoo's pending entrance into the AdSense advertising market, and outlines some things Yahoo (and MSN for that matter) can do to compete, including: Paypal payouts, revenue share transparency, rewarding quality (but small) publishers, and offering an alternative to "keyword bids" for advertisers." It should be noted that Yahoo has already been fighting Google on this front - Overture, owned by Yahoo!, has been running an Ad-Sense like program for a while.

Comments

Re:A few thoughts...

[leonmergen]

• Seriously though, has anyone read their privacy page? It's worse than AOL's AIM TOS.
  To quote a few of their policies:
  Yahoo! automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, Yahoo! cookie information, and the page you request./b>

... exactly the same as apache does by default, except the cookies - oh boy...

• Yahoo! uses information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients. aka "Sell your habits as an anonymous client to advertisers

So far no real privacy issues here; they are merely analysing the behaviour of anonymous clients, and/or target advertisements based on behaviour of clients; for example, never show an advertisement more than 5 times to each user (cookies) or try to find out how often certain links are clicked from certain pages inside their site...

... still pretty normal website administration here.

• These companies may use your personal information to help Yahoo! communicate with you about offers from Yahoo! and our marketing partners.

Ah, and here you do have a little point; this is probably based on your personal account information. Most likely this allows them to target for example German advertisers to German visitors...

And please, don't say I don't have any solid proof that they are not doing this; there is just as little proof that says they do do bad stuff with your privacy...
I'm merely illustrating here that this shouldn't mean all terror and shouldn't be a sole reason to stay away from Yahoo!.