YPN is looking for that competitive edge over Google. And it looks like they may have found it. Yahoo Publisher Network was down last night for 3 hours due to updates. Come to find out this morning that what they were updating was an additional means to be paid. Enter Paypal.

I plan to stick with direct deposit. I’d rather have my money instantly. Why add a middle man? I can understand why they wanted to add PayPal though. A lot of webmasters use Paypal as a way to hold their money for transactions. We buy and sell links, sites, and content with Paypal so we don’t have to send other people checks or cash. It’s almost like buying stuff if fake money.

Another reason why YPN is adding PayPal as a payment method is probably to compete with Google’s own version of Paypal. In the future, Google will have their own Paypal and will probably offer payouts through it. I don’t know, but maybe they already do have this? By Yahoo jumping in with PayPal they are sticking it to Google. Tons of webmasters would rather have money put into PayPal than have a check sent to them.

These are probably steps towards Yahoo’s end of beta. When Yahoo officially opens their doors to international folks.