roydesouza - 11:29 am on Jul 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

I am new to these boards. I want to try to explain this:

"I need to update my original post to say that we took YPN code off of most of our pages except for a few, and, of course, as soon as we did, the YPN epc on those pages went through the roof. Arrgh. We'll wait a bit to see how things progress but we may have to switch back to YPN."

Yahoo is probably not playing games. I work for a publisher ad serving company. This behavior is explicable:

Each ad network e.g. AdSense or YPN or Casale represent a sales team (or online self service sales interface). The "sales team" closes some high paying advertisers and many low paying advertisers.

If you give a network just a few impressions per unique user, then that network will only show the high paying ads- and eCPM you get will be high. BUT if you give it more impressions per unique user then that network will also show low paying advertisers and your eCPM will fall.

Key to success is to use an ad server (disclosure: I work for an ad serving company) to sequence all ad networks PER USER. EACH USER should be shown e.g. 2 ads from YPN, then 2 ads from Casale, then 2 ads from Blue Lithium, then 2 ads from Ad Sense. This is vital to maximize revenue for sites where each user is seeing many impressions per day.