Yahoo! Publisher Network aka YPN was supposed to be Yahoo!’s answer to Google Adsense and quite a few had high hopes for it.

With numerous delays and the program still being in Beta, reports have now surfaced that Yahoo! is planning to test Google Adsense for next couple of weeks on its search results!

“Yahoo will be testing Google’s AdSense for Search service, which will deliver relevant ads alongside Yahoo’s own natural search results,” said Google in a statement. “This is only a limited test and does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense program.”

“The testing does not necessarily mean that Yahoo will join the AdSense for Search program or that any further commercial relationship with Google will result,” Yahoo said in a statement.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

While both parties might be trying to emphasizing that this is just a test, this in a way shows that Yahoo! has accepted that it is not only not able to compete with Google Adsense, it doesn’t want Microsoft to take over and this might just be the first small step in bringing Yahoo! closer to Google.

This is certainly not good news for the online advertising market, especially for those who were looking at YPN as an alternative to Adsense. Microsoft has issued a similar statement regarding this matter:

“Any definitive agreement between Yahoo and Google would consolidate over 90% of the search advertising market in Google’s hands,” said Microsoft in a statement. “This would make the market far less competitive, in sharp contrast to our own proposal to acquire Yahoo.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Next few months would be very interesting indeed and it would be interesting to see how Microsoft reacts to this.