One of the great lessons I’ve had to learn over the years of doing business online is that of “standing in the stream”. In essence, what that means is that people are looking for stuff they want/need online…and they are going to search for it in whatever way makes the most sense to them. In the old-school model, you first needed to create a perception of need and then brand your product so that it was tied (in people’s minds) to your product as the solution. But, in the internet age, it’s backward…if you’ve got a product that meets a need, you find out what “they” (the peeps) are looking for already, and then you get out there and “stand in the stream” where they are already searching.
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AdSense has been the King of contextual advertising for awhile. But, before AdSense, there was Overture…which was acquired and rebranded by Yahoo some time back as Yahoo Publisher Network. I was approved for the program a couple years ago, but haven’t done much other than toy with it from time to time. Recently, I had occasion to pull AdSense off a bunch of my sites for awhile, and I decided to give YPN a closer look. It doesn’t completely suck, however, it doesn’t match up well with AdSense, either…at least not on my sites and in my content niches. I find this sad…since competition is generally a great driving force, and MSN seems to be…well, who the heck knows what they are doing with contextual advertising from a publisher side? Anyway…regarding YPN, here are my observations:
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I saw an interesting article in the NY Times this morning, called Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike.

It’s about why an increasing base of knowledge tends to results in less functional products and services. The concept is this: “it’s nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself”

This has been a pet peeve of mine for the longest time. As consumers…sometimes we don’t notice it, sometimes it’s irritating, sometimes we’re enraged by it, and for me, I frequently find myself taking my business elsewhere (having concluded that…if a company wants my business, they’ll find a way to allow me to get what I need without killing myself). Here are recent examples from my own experience:
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