Recommends Developer Documentation

Recommends is Yahoo Ad Tech’s native monetization solution with content recirculation. It provides publishers with personalized recommendations for content on their desktop and/or mobile properties. That means, publishers can promote higher levels of user engagement, increased page views, and drive traffic to their websites.

As a publisher, you can monetize your sites by sharing in the revenue earned when a user clicks on a sponsored recommendation.

Value Proposition

Optimizing for the consumer experience is more than just a balance of content and ads. It’s the mix between drawing your consumers deeper into your content, generating loyalty and reinforcing brand identity - but it’s also about content discovery and creating fresh content experiences.

The Yahoo Ad Tech Recommends solution brings the best of both worlds, with a native ad format that recirculates your content and brings relevant, out of network content to your users, across sponsored or non-sponsored.

As a publisher, if you want to syndicate your content to our O&O and other premium publisher partners, as traffic acquisition or a brand awareness tool, you can do that as well as an advertiser with Yahoo Ad Tech – all with the same solution.

Get Started

Getting started with Recommends is easy and straightforward, and is accomplished via a JavaScript tag. You can work with a dedicated onboarding and account management team to help you leverage the largest non-social marketplace for monetization via Yahoo Ad Tech.

Prerequisites

To work successfully with the Recommends API, you’ll need to have experience building and developing projects using XML, web-based scripting and hosting, as well as the JavaScript programming language.

Brief Overview

Yahoo Ad Tech Recommends supports the following key features:

  • Recommends runs as a JavaScript client on a publisher page.

  • Includes responsive layouts, templates, placements and infinite scroll, among other features.

  • Renders various Yahoo Native ad formats, like images, video, carousel ads and more.

  • Enables custom video playback for Yahoo Native video, as well as a player for programmatic video.

  • Relies on instrumentation via rapid.

How It Works

To learn how Recommends works for Publishers using modules, tune into this video by Marco Morais, Senior Principal Software Dev Engineer on the Yahoo Ad Tech team.

Duration: 2:55 min

How To Use This Guide

This guide is intended for Yahoo Ad Tech publishers, developers and account managers. It serves as the current source of truth for the Recommends API and its JavaScript ad tag instrumentation.

Use the guide as a toolkit to navigate topics and essential reference material, and to explore implementation details, how-to’s, case studies, FAQs and best practices.

Important

This guide provides you with the basic steps on how to get started and Yahoo Ad Tech Recommends. For managed accounts, be sure to reach out to your Yahoo Ad Tech account team for greater assistance in setting up your content recommendation solutions on your desktop and/or mobile properties.

Key Terminology

Recommends makes the following distinction between site and sponsored recommendatons:

Term

Definition

Site recommendation

A personalized content recommendation from the same publisher hosting the content.

Sponsored recommendation

A content recommendation in which the party hosting the recommendation is compensated by the content creator for making the recommendation.

Note

FTC guidelines require that such content be identified as sponsored before and, in some cases, after a click.

Onboarding

For Yahoo Native publishers who wish to onboard to Recommends, an ads.txt entry is required for ads served from publisher sites. The ID that must be included in the ads.txt file is the Native Ad Publisher ID.

Ads.txt was created by the IAB to allow publishers to publicly declare the specific exchanges they work with in the digital advertising space. The goal of ads.txt is to improve transparency and decrease fraud revenue.

Contact your account manager for details on ads.txt file formatting and other information about ads.txt.

For SSP, refer to the ads.txt and seller.json for Publishers for more information.

Have Feedback?

Your ideas, suggestions and feedback are important to our product and engineering teams.

For support, you can email the Yahoo Ad Tech Team at adsupport@yahooinc.com or, if you’re working with the Native API, reach out directly for more information at solutionsengineering@yahooinc.com.

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