Y! Publisher in effect

After much anticipation and application I am an official beta member of the Yahoo! Publisher Network. You can catch some of the action on my sidebar under the label called Y! Love. Although I was a bit skeptic on running ads on my site, I figure it's new and it's Yahoo! and boohoo on the Mountain View players. I don't expect much from the ads as it is purely in support of the Y! network and its development. Other than that, "Hey, check me out! I got ads"!

Is it like Adwords?

Yes and No. Yes because they are ads and you get paid in roughly the same manner. Per click, and cost per click from the advertiser etc... No in the fact that they don't crawl your page and check for relevance. Instead, you choose a category (or categories) as relevancy for your site. As of 'beta' the categories suck because I couldn't choose anything past 'Computers/Internet' as to what the hell I'm talking about on this blog... not that I'm ever consistent but we'd all like to think we talk about a particular subject. What we should do is just allow some uber list of tags that can be applied as categories which will dictate what ads get served. Yea. That would be nice...

Flexibility

Better than adsense. But still not that great. The user is still limmited to certain widths heights and colors that must be chosen as part of the integration process. To me, that is too obtrusive and there should be an API which allows the developer to receive a simple container with basic / semantic html and let our own css take care of the rest. It's understandable that they want to make this highly available for the masses, but come on, people are putting ads on their site - that have to know something about web development. Perhaps having an option to choose one or the other would be nice. Granted I got it to look fairly nice on my sidebar, but not without some some fair amount of fidling with the JavaScript.

i am dustin diaz