janethuggard - 12:45 am on Aug 3, 2005 (gmt 0)

If these are purely human edited, I don't have much faith in it. We have tried that already, and in fact have some of those on one site right now. Two adservers that use the human editing, were tried extensively and were total failures. We pulled them. The CTR and earnings on them are very weak. Often the ads are only remotely targeted.

A hypothetical example of that would be:
Site with soccer scores. They don't have any soccer related ads, so they put loan ads on the page,
or they only have a couple soccer ads, so they backfill with general interest text ads.

While some visitors looking for soccer scores, might very well be in the market for a loan, ads for discounted soccer related products would be much more effective, and earn us more.

I had been under the impression that Yahoo was going 'head to head' with Google, and was going to be offering similar adserving technology. If not, this is a major disappointment, and will not encourage us to change what is already working for us, very well. It is alot of work to change out code for new adservers, even in trials, only to have to change it all back again. Been there, done that, several times, this year.

I will want to see something more worthwhile, before I disrupt our revenue, and throw our time resources behind an unscheduled change. It is too late in the year for that kind of major change. It would have been better if they launched this early in Q1 if their adserver process is not equal to Google, so we could work through it, before the crucial Q4. There is really not enough time to try it, see if it is any good, and switch back if not, before U.S. Labor Day, which is the kick-off of ecommerce peak season. I'm not risking anything at this time of the year. We plan and work our fanny off all year for Q4, and are not just going to jeopardise all that, for a new product release. That would be a HUGE mistake.

Thinking we will sit tight, and keep our ear to the ground, until next year at earliest. If you do try this, hopefully you will come back to us and let us know how your trials pan out.

Footnote: We are seeing an early kick-off of peak season this year, with heavier than usual and earlier than usual 'back to school' visitors. Looks like a very promising Q4 for ecommerce sites.