From Syndicate: A Chat with YPN

I had a chance to sit down with Cody Simms, product marketing manager of Yahoo! Publisher Network, here at Syndicate. Some interesting tidbits about the philosophy and future of the network (currently in beta).

• On Volume. Currently YPN has signed 2,000 beta publishers and has recently issued another 1,000 invitations. The beta will expand further in the new year.
  
• On Consumer-Generated Content on Yahoo! Regarding the newly-launched Yahoo! Answers, Cody said, “We are looking at ways we can create incentives for people to participate within the question and answer format.” Terry Semel talked a little bit at Web 2.0 about letting Yahoo! users display ads (and share revenues) on content they create on the portal’s own pages.
  
• On Search. YPN will soon begin syndicating Yahoo! Search to smaller publishers. Like in the Google model, publishers will get a cut of ad revenue generated via the searches they help initiate. More Yahoo! Web services — like maps, for example — will also be distributed through YPN.
  
• On del.icio.us. “We always keep our users central to what we’re doing, so if we find that it benefits our users to have their tags bring advertisements that are relevant to them, that’s a possibility but not something we’ve looked into yet.”