Sunnyvale, California— Barely a day after naming Carol Bartz as the successor to Jerry Yang as chief executive, Yahoo has given up its hope in Europe, and may be shutting down its
by March 31, an advertising partnership program that allows Yahoo Publisher Network publishers to place Yahoo-selected ads on their Web sites, leaving it running only sponsored search and display advertising businesses there, according to a report by the PPC Hero blog.
According to the email received by PPC Hero, they Sunnyvale company said they will officially shut down by 31st March, the same date they are officially closing the Adobe PDF ads.
“Yahoo Europe is closing Content Match as we do not wish to invest further resources in developing this product,” Yahoo said in a statement Wednesday. “We have other products which, in the current climate, are attracting a growing proportion of advertiser spend and we would like to focus our efforts on these. These include Sponsored Search and Display, including Direct Response solutions.”
Content Match competes directly with Google’s AdSense platform, which enables publishers to monetize sites by displaying sponsored links according to content, user profile or geography. In both cases, the companies share the ad revenue with the publishers. Making use of such a feasible platform has become a way for bloggers to make some money off their sites — and also a way for people to try to game the system by.
The Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) never really appeared beyond the United States, although the UK Yahoo advertisers were always allowed to purchase ads distributed through YPN.
Here is snippet of the email received by the PPC Heros:
“As a valued client we are writing to give you advance notice of the closure of our Content Match product in Europe.”
The decision to close Content Match underlines our commitment to focus on our Sponsored Search and Display business and to simplify our solutions to deliver a high ROI for our advertisers.
Content Match will close on 31 March 2009, after which the product will no longer be supported. All Advertisers should therefore opt out of the Content Match marketplace by this date. Your account manager will be happy to assist you.
How to Opt-out instructions:
We aim to work with you to propose alternative products.
However, the U.S. Content Match program is still continuing its operation, Yahoo said in its statement.
Nevertheless some observers of Yahoo’s recent travails have recommended it to sell its entire search business, but the new CEO Carol Bartz told staff on Wednesday her “gut instinct” was to hold on to it — and that she still wishes to evaluate the pros and cons of such a move, Dow Jones says.