Broadway - 2:09 pm on Oct 24, 2006 (gmt 0)

I signed up with YPN a long time ago, immediately implemented ads, and was of course immediately disappointed with the ads and earnings. Within a few days I switched back almost exclusively to Adsense, leaving just a few YPN ads running on my site. Here several months later I am again investigating using YPN to a greater degree.

The first place I looked was to see what types of ad sizes are available. I was sure by now there would be an Adlinks format. The earnings from the addition of Adlinks to my site some years ago was a pleasant, unexpected surprise.

For whatever reason YPN does not offer this format. While I have no real knowledge about the workings of YPN, as one who has programmed extensively in the past, wouldn't you expect that adding a rudimentary form of this one type of feature would take a single YPN employee no more than a week and at the outside a month? We're talking about a variation on an existing theme, not creating something from scratch.

Then I went to the Ad Categories section to see what Ad Categories and subcategories existed. I still have hard feelings about all of the bottled water adds YPN served on my health related site in the begining of YPN. And no, bottled water doesn't really figure in with the content of my site. I just Googled this, in the serval hundred pages of content of my site the term "water" is used on 3 of them.

It seemed so to implement the categories feature I was going to have to choose a category that, yes, possibly included my topic but seemed to put me at risk of getting a bunch of totally unrelated ads too. It would be like if I had a site about golf carts that I would have to choose the automotive sub category be cause no closer fit existed. Is there anything more important with a program like YPN than both the advertiser and publisher feeling confident about the ad targeting?

When looking at the sub category list it was painfully obvious how overlapping subcategories could be created so to drill down to a grouping of ads that would be preditably on-target for me as a publisher and the participating advertisers. (By the way, I didn't see a link to click that would show me what type of ads to expect from each sub category.) And once again, wouldn't expanding on the sub categories lists take one or two employees possibly a month or two? This is scut work not rocket science.

Does anyone with any imagination work at YPN? Why don't they want this program to work?