The SEO Blog: Yahoo! Publisher Network to Compete with AdSense

For the past four years, Google has been the undisputed leader in search. Its rivals, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask Jeeves have spent the past few years working to narrow the vast technological and popularity gap between them and the great Google. It has been a long and hard fought series of skirmishes and battles but this week, two of the three, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves, signaled they might be getting closer.

In June 2003, Google made one of the wildest moves in the history of the Internet by innovating on the paid-advertising idea originally conceived by Overture. Already the most popular tool among search engine users, Google gave website publishers a revenue generating gift that kept on giving. Google's great PPC innovation was to permit AdWords advertising to appear on private websites, splitting the click-through fees 50/50 with the private webmasters whose sites delivered traffic. By giving private webmasters the opportunity to generate incidental revenues by acting as billboards for AdWords, Google saw profits from AdWords skyrocket while Internet users became conditioned to accept the small and unobtrusive ads.
The SEO Blog: Yahoo! Publisher Network to Compete with AdSense