The Yahoo! Contributor Network

The Associated Content team is thrilled to announce the latest step in the evolution of our publishing platform.

WELCOME TO THE

What is the Yahoo! Contributor Network? It’s the same publishing platform you know and love as an Associated Content contributor, but with a new name and a new color scheme. You can even sign in to the Yahoo! Contributor Network using your existing Associated Content user name and password.

There are a few exciting enhancements, however:

• From now on, your profile, account dashboard, and content menu will display content you’ve published throughout the Yahoo! network, complete with page view data!
  
• You will start earning Performance Payments on numerous Yahoo! sites!
  
• Your content may live on more than one Yahoo! site, and you’ll earn Performance Payments in each participating location!

More good news:

The Associated Content library is here to stay! Associated Content from Yahoo! is now the official digital library of the Yahoo! Contributor Network. That means that much of the content you submit through the Yahoo! Contributor Network will still be published on AssociatedContent.com, and you’ll continue earning Up-Front Payments and Performance Payments just like you always have.

For more information about this exciting transition, visit our special page of Frequently Asked Questions.

To get started on the Yahoo! Contributor Network, sign in using your existing Associated Content from Yahoo! user name and password.

Thank you for your many wonderful contributions to the Associated Content platform throughout the years! We’re ecstatic about this opportunity to help you share your knowledge and passion some of the world’s most popular online destinations. Here’s to the future!

Sincerely,

The Associated Content from Yahoo! & Yahoo! Contributor Network team

Pardon Our Dust

Dear Contributors,

In a recent post, we updated you on the exciting & complex process of integrating the Associated Content publishing platform into the Yahoo! network.

We’re pleased to say that we’ve made a lot of progress since then, and we’re looking forward to telling you all about some BIG changes that we think will leave everyone saying:

In order to pave the way for the next step, we’re scheduling two hours of maintenance to our site, starting at 7pm Eastern on Sunday. From 7pm to 9pm EST on 11/14, you will not be able to sign in to your Associated Content from Yahoo! account, nor publish any content. Content pages may also be down during this window, but believe us – it's worth it.

Please pardon our dust, and look forward to some exciting developments after it settles!

October 2010 Monthly Award Winners Announced!

Congratulations to our October, 2010 Best of AC and Rising Star Award Winners!

This month's Best of AC Awards went to top Contributors in Personal Finance, Politics, and Sports. It was, as always, a tough contest, but in the end awards went to three outstanding Contributors who triumphed thanks to their extraordinary skills and personal expertise in their topic areas. Congratulations to Bill Stanley (The Money Coach), William Browning, and Joshua Huffman. Check out the full announcement for more!

Our monthly Rising Star Awards recognize newer writers who are standing out in the AC community. It takes no small measure of courage to establish oneself on a new publishing platform, and these awards present bragging rights and a cash prize to Contributors brave enough to jump right in and talented enough to do so successfully. This month's winners are Vanessa Evans, Clayton Browne, Linda Rogacki, Jean Kelly, and Heather Braegger. Congratulations to the winners! Read our full-length announcement for more.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

It's been five months since Associated Content founder Luke Beatty first announced that AC was joining the Yahoo! family, and our team is hard at work on the exciting & challenging process of fully integrating our publishing platform into websites across the Yahoo! network.

We’d like to share some of our progress with our community of Contributors, and give you a glimpse at what's happening next.

Over the summer, we started building bridges to sites like Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! News and omg! from Yahoo! by releasing custom assignments for our Contributors to tackle. We've also been distributing work from the AC library to further test these in-roads, and figure out how our Contributors' voices can best be showcased on these popular destination sites.

Like any major endeavor, this integration process has not been without its hang-ups & hiccups, but our whole team is happy about the way things are shaping up. Stand-out successes from these early publishing trials have included first-person stories landing on the front page of Yahoo.com (most recently: veteran Contributor Steve Thompson's article for Yahoo! Finance), Halloween tips from our community being featured prominently on Shine's Halloween page and regular Yahoo! beats for some of our best Contributors in different topics (for instance, check out Jolie du Pre's celeb Twitter series for omg!). This is a small taste of what's to come.

All of this excitement aside, there's one piece of feedback that's been loud and clear from our community throughout the integration process: Publishing from AC to other Yahoo! sites will feel a lot more rewarding once Performance Payments are in the mix!

Our current methods of publishing content outside of AssociatedContent.com — custom assignments and distribution — carry flat rates. The beauty of the Performance Payment model, launched for AssociatedContent.com back in 2007, is that it ties Contributors’ revenue to the popularity of their content and gives each piece literally limitless earning potential.

We've said from the get-go that we intend to enable performance payments for other Yahoo! sites, and now we're ready to put an ETA against that goal: We plan to launch a new performance payment system, applying to Yahoo! sites beyond AssociatedContent.com, by the end of January 2011. A variety of Yahoo! sites, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports, will be a part of this initial expansion and others will follow soon thereafter.

Some Contributors have asked why it isn't possible to enable these new features immediately, or open them across the Yahoo! network in one fell swoop. The reality is that this next step is a technologically tall order that involves creating open channels for the free flow of content and data between our platform and each individual site. Those are the connections we've been working toward steadily for 5 months. Soon, all of that hard work will start paying off in a major way.

Many thanks to our community for working alongside of us, and stay tuned for more details as our integration continues!