The next Yahoo program to be discontinued are the Yahoo Publisher Network RSS ads. Here is an email I just received from Yahoo:

We wanted to let you know that we are closing our Ads in RSS program effective February 2, 2009. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners, such as Sponsored Search and Content Match. We recommend that you remove current Content Match tags from your RSS pages.

Please be assured that we continue to invest in both our Sponsored Search and Content Match products and are excited about many upcoming improvements for 2009. We appreciate our relationship with you and look forward to working with you to grow our business together.

Yahoo launched the RSS ads back in November 2005. I assume it never took off and they have now decided to drop that portion of the overall product.

Yahoo also recently announced they will be discontinuing content match in the UK.

Related Topics: Yahoo: Publisher Network

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz