Clark - 5:16 am on Jun 6, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hi Pete,

Thanks for the update. It seems advertisers aren't too happy with Yahoo's program based on these responses. I'd like to submit there are issues from the publisher side too.

Yahoo! takes multiple factors into account, such as conversion rate

Not very useful when your ads are so poorly targetted. I have categories set up. But ads from all kinds of unrelated nonsense. No one clicks the ads. No shock there. So I write Yahoo, please fix the targetting or check if everything is ok on my account. Yahoo responds (paraphrasing) that my account is fine and that ads are being targetted as designed. And they assume those "irrelevant" ads are showing up because the advertisers are bidding more.

Wonderful, but no one clicks the ads because they don't belong on my site. But if that's the design, of course I remove 99% of the ads that were up there.

So now Yahoo plans to penalize publishers for poor conversion? Well if the ads aren't targetted, the conversion won't be good. I don't think Yahoo has much good data right now. So I don't see how the quality controls will help, even if the system is well designed. You'd have to start from scratch. (assuming that others experienced the same problems I did...and I know they did because I've spoken to other pubs and read it all over the web).

Don't mean to put you on the spot, but if Yahoo doesn't address this concern somehow, then these initiatives won't convince us to try again.