“You In?” program encourages acts of good during the holiday season

Bob Hope once said, “If you haven't any charity in your heart, you have the worst kind of heart trouble.”

Truer words were seldom spoken. At Yahoo!, we strive not only to not be evil, we want to do a little good. That’s why, during this year’s season of sharing, we’ve launched the year-end giving campaign “You In?”.

The campaign, designed to send a cascade of kindness throughout the Yahooniverse and beyond, is an extension of our Yahoo! for Good Purple Acts of Kindness program, and aims to encourage you, the most valuable part of our global community of 600 million, to give back a little of your good fortune through random acts of kindness---and encourages others to do the same.

And without necessarily spending a dime.

Online spending during the early part of the holiday shopping season is strongest ever

Brick-and-mortar stores weren’t the only recipients of consumer love, as the holiday season kicked off with Black Friday and Cyber Monday following Thanksgiving. Even before Cyber Monday (the biggest online shopping day of the year) actually began, shoppers were heading online to get great deals. According to the analytics firm comScore, U.S. online spending on the Black Friday weekend was the strongest it’s ever been, up 11% over the prior year, with $595 million spent online.

A jump that high is worth taking notice of, especially when you consider that the increase in brick-and-mortar sales from 2008 to 2009 was only 0.5%. Of course, brick-and-mortar spending greatly overshadowed online spending for Black Friday weekend, but the huge disparity between yearly increases for both areas of sales is interesting to note.

For more, visit the Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog.

Launch of Ad Interest Manager lets Yahoo! users control the types of ads they see

Today Yahoo! announced the launch of a new tool called the Ad Interest Manager, which will help users control the kinds of interest-based advertising they see on Yahoo!. It lets Yahoo! users see a concise summary of the interest categories that we infer about them, as well as the types of activities that qualify them for those categories.

The tool will show users a variety of things, including:

• The behavioral targeting categories we infer they are interested in. (e.g., Finance/Investments)
• The categories of recent searches they have done (e.g., Entertainment)
• Where they spend their time on Yahoo!, denoted by high, medium or low levels of interactions with Yahoo! properties (e.g., Finance or Mail)

An Announcement from Right Media

Right Media will discontinue supporting the Direct Media Exchange (DMX)---our self-serve platform for small publishers looking to monetize their sites. The DMX site will serve ads through Jan. 31t and DMX participants can access their reports through March 1.

For more on this anncouncement, see the full post on the Right Media blog by Stephanie Dorman, Senior Director, Client Services and Operations.

---The Team