Yahoo! Announces Ad-Supported Content Network; Looking At NAI Cookie Compliance; MoCapital For MoPub

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign-up here.

Yahoo!’s Like Button

It’s an ad network. It’s content. It’s both! Looking to leverage its content trove, The Wall Street Journal reports that Yahoo! will roll-out a new content network plan that may be Yahoo!’s version of the Facebook “Like” button. Amir Efrati writes, “The network and the content personalization plan are being spearheaded by [Chief Product Officer Blake] Irving and Yahoo’s sales chief, Ross Levinsohn. The duo has been pitching website publishers and advertisers on a plan to use small applications, called widgets, on their pages, these people said.” In addition to sharing revenue with publishers with what may be some very attractive CPMs, Yahoo! could also drop cookies and feed the beast of its ad targeting capabilities throughout the new network and on Yahoo! owned and operated sites. Read more. It’s the Facebook “Like” widget and Facebook ad network rolled into one!

Cookie Deletion Results

A research team at Stanford University’s Center For Internet And Society says that half of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) membership who says there is a wide variance in how ad networks and data companies are managing cookies once a user asks for cookies to be deleted. Stanford’s Jonathan Mayer writes, “NAI member companies pledge only to allow opting out of behavioral ad targeting, not tracking. Of the 64 companies we studied, 33 left tracking cookies in place after opting out.” Read more. Methodology and overall results are discussed in detail.

Serving Up Capital For Mobile

Another day, another funding in the world of mobile advertising. This time it’s MoPub. TechCrunch’s Leena Rao decribes the company’s capabilities, “[MoPub] develops a self-serve ad serving platform for mobile applications and websites that allows mobile publishers to serve direct-sold rich media banner and interstitial ads.” Accel Partners led the $6.5 million round. Read more.

Crowd-ing The Creative

Dough Schumacher leads the discussion around the use of crowdsourcing for creative in an article on iMedia Connection. Despite some voices in the creative world, he suggests that the unique challenge of creative can be solved by the crowd, “Ideas are perhaps the easiest forms of data to exchange. Entire ad campaigns can be presented as a written paragraph with some visual references. For visual projects like design, you could argue the language issue isn’t nearly as problematic.” He looks at newly-funded 99designs solution.

Analyzing With The DMP

A new BlueKai whitepaper professes to give a “360 degree” view of data management platform (DMP) analytics. One slice is the “predictive” piece as the paper explains that it can “help validate your existing profiles for your target audiences, as well as provide insight into non-intuitive attributes that can help extend your targeting profile, or fuel new audience segmentation.” Download it (some PII required).

Implied (Targetable) Network

Greg Linden has posted anew on his personal blog and finds a Google whitepaper in the wild which could also have some implications with look-alike modeling in the ad network biz – but is most revealing of Google’s social friends plans. He writes, “I like the idea of using e-mail, mobile, and messaging contacts as an implicit social network. One problem has always been that the implicit social network can be noisy in embarrassing ways. As this paper discusses, using it only for suggesting friends is forgiving and low-risk while still being quite helpful.” Read more. And, download the public Google secrets (PDF).

But Wait. There’s More!