I mentioned the rumors here on this since March this year. Even if Yahoo officials declined to comment, it seems that Yahoo is planning to launch on Wednesday an ad network for small Web publishers intended to strengthen its hand against rival Google, a source familiar with the plan told CNET News.com.

While Yahoo and Google already go head-to-head serving major search-advertising partners such as America Online, Google has largely enjoyed a monopoly delivering its signature text-only ads to smaller content sites, including blogs.

Now Yahoo will play to that constituency and challenge Google’s pricing power in one of the fastest-growing online mediums: blogging. Like Google’s service, Yahoo’s self-serve product will display text ads deemed relevant to the content of specific Web pages. Advertisers pay only when a reader clicks on their ads. Yahoo and publishers will split the fees.

And that’s not all. Google is receiving a punch from Ask.com also. Google accounted for roughly 70% of Ask Jeeves’ revenue of $261 million last year. The Google relationship turned out to be Ask Jeeves’ salvation as it struggled to survive shortly after the dot-com meltdown. With its survival no longer in doubt and its Web sites growing in popularity, Ask Jeeves believes it’s well positioned to develop its own advertising network.

All this fuzz while the latest studies show that a nearly 1/3 PPC click fraud.

The experiment was conducted in conjunction with Los Angeles-based Clicks2Customers.com and focused on three pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns running during a 10-day period in 2005. Duplicate clicks were determined by comparing IP addresses, language, browser settings, referring URL, time of click, operating system, browser plug-ins and country of origin.

“Our random sample of PPC campaigns uncovered as much as 29.5 percent PPC fraud and showed that Google was able to account for and credit only a tiny portion of those fraudulent charges,” McGlaughlin said. “Whether it is click fraud or the lesser known impression fraud, these fraudulent clicks can cause a lot of damage to advertisers because it drains their budgets. Companies should be aware of how big of a problem it really is and be equipped to more aptly detect it.”

UPDATE: News confirmed on Yahoo!blog, beta signup here (US only)

Technorati tags: Online Advertising, PPC, click fraud