Speculating on Yahoo! YPN and the Microcontent Stack

Many outlets have been speculating about Yahoo!’s upcoming launch of YPN, and leaks abound.

Here’s what we “know”:

• Yahoo! will offer a self-serve model for its Content Match contextual advertising service to micro-content publishers

Here’s my speculation:

1. Yahoo! will release this offering not only for the web, but also for Feeds
2. Yahoo! will offer some form of quid-pro-quo free/discounted/preferred MyYahoo Feed Directory placement for publisher’s using its Contextual Advertising services
3. Yahoo! will release a blog/Feed publishing platform for North America

I would be surprised if #1 wasn’t available at launch. Two and Three may come in a quarter or two… but I’d be shocked if it didn’t happen sooner rather than later.

What’s driving the speculation? Analysis of the benefits of completing the micro-content stack. Completing the stack:

1. Maximizes the number of opportunities to monetize mico-content on your own platform
2. Minimizes customer acquisition costs (at all points)
3. Allows for proprietary extensions
4. Allows for the collection of a variety of data that will directly drive yield across the network (i.e., beyond the stack itself)

(For those who aren’t disciples of Porter, you can get similar results by reading between the lines at the YPN site.)

With Google’s Marissa Mayer indicating that they won’t be adding RSS support to Google News, it’s not clear when Google will ship an aggregator to complete its stack…

Meanwhile, Microsoft announced today that they are launching a pilot program (perhaps to coincide with the launch of YPN?!) of their Pay-For-Performance (P4P) Search advertising marketplace and listings; they’ve also recently announced the development of IE 7 and launched a prototype of a web-based Feed Reader.

Funding around RSS is likely to get very interesting indeed. I suspect we’ll see several of the better known start-ups changing their positioning in the harsh light of the reality of three complete mass-market stacks by the end of the year.

And finally, in the usual suspects category… AOL appears to be running in super-slow-mo; don’t even get me started on the MSM players.

UPDATE: Here’s my coverage of the launch of Yahoo! 360, and what it means (vis-a-vis the above) now that we’ve seen the broad feature set.