Yandex Advertising Network Opened

Internet, December 22, 2005. Today, Yandex launches Yandex Advertising Network — a system of context ad display at the Russian Internet sites. Now site owners will be able to make money with Yandex, and paid search customers will get a new product. Advertisement is displayed in the format of Yandex.Direct system, i.e. line text ads that are paid per click.

The owners of sites that participate in Yandex Ad Network get half of the revenues received from their ad spots. Currently, Yandex.Direct simultaneously holds 15,000 advertising campaigns by more than 230,000 keywords. Therefore, the Ad Network members will get enough advertisers right away.

Yandex advertises all kinds of goods and services; Yandex.Direct ads are displayed for more than 20% of all search queries. Many of the queries are highly competitive: their bids go up to as much as several dollars, and the queues have dozens of ads. Context placement at Ad Network spots will provide advertisers with additional targeted ad displays.

“Tens of thousands of our advertisers are interested in increasing the number of ad displays while preserving advertising efficiency,” states Eugene Lomize, Head of Yandex Advertising Technologies Department. “On the other hand, many sites with quality target audiences cannot afford building own sales systems. Yandex Advertising Network aims to help the demand meet the supply.”

Context ads can be managed in Yandex.Direct, a familiar interface for advertisers. Paid search still remains the key product for Yandex advertizers. However, now they get an additional opportunity to place context ads at partner sites. .Context advertising is a separate product with individual pricing.

For a month, all network mechanisms will undergo testing. During the testing time, the click price in Yandex Ad Network is 70% of click prices at search result pages. In the future, advertisers will have a possibility to set their own prices per click at different types of ad spots.

Large sites are invited to join Yandex Ad Network first. Next year, Yandex will be happy to invite a wide circle of Internet resources for partnership. The first members of Yandex Ad Network are the online edition on advertising Adme.ru, the tourist portal Travel.ru, and the computer technologies digest 3DNews.ru.

For relevant ad placement, Yandex uses own technology that accounts for both lexical and thematic similarity of advertisements and web pages of Ad Network participants. In particular, it analyzes the key phrases of ads and their click through rate (CTR) at Yandex search, the subjects of pages to which the ads are linked, and the subjects of pages where the ads are displayed.

“When a user makes a query in the search system, it provides explicit information about his or her interests. This allows displaying relevant advertisement, based on matches of queries to ad keywords. However, for ‘non-search’ context advertisement, lexical matches alone are not enough,” explains Michael Maslov, Head of Yandex Search Technologies Development Department. “For example, pages with tour descriptions often mention refrigerators and TV-sets, and pages on household appliances name production countries. Advertising household appliances in the first case or package tours in the second case will be inefficient and will fail to attract target visitors. That is why it is important to consider both the lexical and thematic commonality of web-pages and ads.”

For more detailed terms and requirements for participation in Yandex Ad Network, visit this page. Applications are welcome at support@partners.yandex.ru.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com