Written on October 16th, 2005 at 04:10 pm by Darren Rowse
Yahoo Y!Q
I’ve been pondering a feature that Yahoo have added to their Yahoo News pages at some point in the last few months.
The feature I’m talking about is Y!Q - an in content link that appears on keywords in News articles that looks like this:
If you click this link a little box opens up over the article you are reading with some results from yahoo search and news like this (click to enlarge):
Obviously Yahoo are beta testing Y!Q in an attempt to integrate their services and push traffic back into their Search and News results - but I’m wondering how long it will be before they add advertisements to the pop up screen and then offer this system to publishers to use in a similar way to YPN or Adsense.
In some ways this would be a cross between Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT which puts text ads into content as links and the Adsense for Search. I suspect we’ll see more and more advertising options that become more and more deeply linked into sites in the coming years - perhaps this is a step towards this.
Update: I should have dug a little deeper in Y!Q before posting - it seems that publishers can already use it on their sites. There is no integration with any income stream for publishers at this stage (and no mention that i can see of it being added) but you can get more information on using it at Y!Q Beta for Publishers.
6 Responses to “Yahoo Y!Q”
Andy Merrett
October 16th, 2005 5:57 pm
I’m not sure I like the trend towards every word in a sentence potentially being an advert. Apart from specific products, it’s distracting and feels somewhat sneaky.
If I am reading about an iPod, I don’t mind if a text link in the article takes me to apple.com, or to a site that sells them, but if someone hotlinks the words ‘MP3 player’ or ‘digital jukebox’ to some shopping site (even one that lists products) I’d feel a little cheated, unless it was obvious (some use a little graphic to show an ad link) - but even then it can break up the flow of writing.
Even worse if people start using very ordinary words.
Sorry, you get the point :) (if that even gets through your spam filter!)
I suppose it’s another way of combatting ad blindness, but where is content allowed to be itself?
Stuart
October 16th, 2005 8:27 pm
Turning individual words on a web page into links - whether the designer of that web page wanted that to happen or not - was something that Microsoft were playing with a couple of years ago.
They did let that lapse but I guess it’s quite likely to come back now that Yahoo are achieving that.
There was some code available that a webmaster could insert into his header tags to prevent Microsoft hijacking various words so I wonder if there is something like that available to block Yahoo?
Matt
October 16th, 2005 11:44 pm
Yeah, I don’t particularly like that idea, unless I can choose the words that get linked (as a publisher). For instance, if I’ve written an article about a specific video card, having that model pop up a link about that specific video card once would be fine. Having a bunch of other words pop up would be… annoying.
I’ve noticed many sites that this happens on as I roll my mouse past the words, they pop up little windows. I find this exceptionally tedious to read.
Athomemama
October 17th, 2005 5:03 am
I agree, once in a while is good, even useful, but the way the links are in Andy’s comment is annoying. In fact, it is one of the hardships I see when I try to read a wikipedia article. None of these are ads, but gosh are they annoying. It really breaks up the flow when every two words are hyperlinked.
Chris @ Deliberate Chaos
October 17th, 2005 6:13 am
Wasn’t a discussion about links in posts not too long ago?
This would be something else that would pull a reader away from ones blog. I can see linking to one or two places in a post, i.e. see the news story here or here’s the item I’m discussing. But, to leaving it to an automated device that might link every three or four words in every paragraph is dangerous because it dilutes readership.
I’d rather manually link to a page or two.
Now, if there was a pay-per-click component, I might be willing to reconsider since there would compensation for losing readers to the Y!Q links.
Mark
October 17th, 2005 1:22 pm
Stuart made the comaparison of Y!Q to MS Smart Tags. Not the same. Not sure if you meant to insult Yahoo!, or complement MS. Either way, the comparison is wrong.
Yahoo does not hijack anyones page. MS did.
I can’t stand reading those Yahoo pages with the big bolded words. It is annoying. Even more annoying is that it appears if you don’t run the buggiest browswers (I.E., Firefox, etc..) to use.
Even the Chitika app is buggy when not used with insecure browsers.
Why can’t programmers code without the MS crutch? Very Lame
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