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

Yahoo!-Facebook deal makes 2010 even more promising for users and advertisers

We have good news to share with everyone who uses Yahoo! and Facebook---in the first half of 2010 we will open the door between two of the Internet’s largest online communities.

This is a natural partnership---52% of Yahoo! users visit Facebook and 84% of Facebook users visit Yahoo!. (comScore, US, Oct 2009) You will be able to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content---ratings, photos, article comments, and more---directly on your Facebook stream, and update your status in both places. We’re doing this by deeply integrating a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo! properties worldwide, which we announced today.

As the place where over 500 million people visit every month, Yahoo!’s goal is to bring together social experiences from across the web, and provide one place for people to access information and stay in touch with the people they care about most.

The move

Tweet your fave raves for the past year with Yahoo!

By all accounts, 2009 was pretty rough year: economic meltdowns, persistent war, piracy on the high seas, fires and floods. You name it, we endured it.

But not all the news was bad. This year saw airline Captain "Sully" Sullenberger save the lives of 155 people by successfully ditching hos plane in the Hudson; a new world land speed record for a steam-powered car; America’s first commercial Zeppelin---yeah, you heard that right:  Zeppelin---service took off into the wild blue yonder over the San Francisco Bay Area; NASA enjoyed a flawless Space Shuttle record and discovered water on the moon; the Large Hadron Collider set a world record in accelerating protons to near light speed and, here at Yahoo!, we announced a dazzling new brand relaunch that promises to be a boon for both our users and advertisers.

Yahoo!’s been crunching the Year in Review numbers since 2001. What we discovered in 2009 is that people all over are coping---and