Andy_r - 6:25 pm on Oct 30, 2006 (gmt 0)

I got the notification email from them also "Unfortunately, due to poor traffic quality, we have terminated your Yahoo! Publisher Network account".

I pull their ads down from the last site I had running YPN just over a month ago. It was a site that was hard to monitize using Adsense because the topic does not have lots of ads/products. I was using the channeling feature to specify ads based on the demographics of the users (mostly women, so I had beauty/cosmetic targeting in place). The CTR was way lower then Adsense but the earnings were way higher.

I suspect they are trying to purge some of their publishers that bring down their average CTR. As a person who already has low CTR (100% forum traffic) YPN was getting 1/4 the CTR of Adsense on the same site (but making 60% more revenue).

I do think their customer service is poor at communications. To just get notified like that is very alienating. I think some warning emails would be smarter.

It's kind of sad to see someone like Yahoo! who had record revenues but declining profits take steps to screw up their business model even more. They were never even close to Adsense on relevancy (wasn't that one of their goals), the new Yahoo search has been delayed, seems like Google is getting all the smart minds and leaving Yahoo with theory and no way to bring it to reality.

I doubt MSN will be able to match Google on relevancy for a while. You need such a huge amount of advertisers to create the inventory for good matching. I advertise on the new Microsoft system and it is not as easy to place ads. Same with Yahoo (the process to is cumbersome). It seems like they are trying to over engineer and come up with a better mouse trap when they should be building the same one.

I am going to ask if I can stay on with YPN (in the event it was my foreign traffic that cause the termination) but if they don't want to try and earn the 15,000,000 pages a month of my traffic, that is their choice.

I know nearly 50% of Google's insane revenue comes from publishers like us. I wonder what percentage of Yahoo! revenue comes from 3rd party publishers. In the end the network who has the most square pixels of your screen to present relevant ads will be King. I suspect Google is going to enjoy that spot for a long time to come.