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Just want to say that just received email from Yahoo that our account is terminated for international traffic.
We were with them from last september and they just terminated without any warning and all of our websites are based in USA.We target USA traffic but there is no good or easy way to stop international traffic.
No click fraud and all the traffic was real.
In my opinion this is not a good way to treat publishers and i feel very helpless.They can kick out whenever they want and we just work hard on our websites and send them real traffic.
Just very confuse and not sure what to do.
Thanks.
That may be extreme but I'm sure YPN has its reasons and I tend to agree with them on this - clicks from foreigners where the advertisers are targeting domestic visitors is unfair to YPN and the advertiser.
Consider if the ratio of clicks from your international traffic is too high in comparison with your domestic traffic, that would also cause some concern.
Example:
50% of your clicks come from international visitors but international traffic is only 10% of the total. That would show a bias in visitor demographics.
Also consider if your international traffic was aroud 1/3 of total, that is likely too much as well. I'm sure YPN has their reasons and they are justified.
Post the monthly percent of USA domestic traffic versus international traffic here from your server logs since September, then we can give you an honest opinion. Without real numbers, we simply cannot offer you any advice.
Thanks.
As such I believe, YPN must have observed your account for a couple of months. Since you've been running the ads since last september, they must have noticed over a period of time that most of your traffic is international.
The max you can do is write to them and see what they have to say. Keep us posted.
Good Luck
S
I don't target anybody, and probably get a fair amount of international traffic, which I am proud of. That being said, given YPN preferences, I have no idea why they would have accepted me in the first place. On top of that, they encouraged me to add more impressions as well.
I'm just assuming that my account will be removed at anytime, and am ok with that. Afterall, I never gave them that many impressions due to this issue anyway.
I do think they could work with publishers by letting them know, like AS does on many occasions. Or they could geocode their ads to not display for international visitors, like AS does. If they can't even handle this I don't think they'll go far.
The key words here are "SOME" and "MOST".
60% of something is 40% of the other. In thish case 40% of international traffic which is way too much and common sense. If I were an advertiser, I would be unhappy to see my ads clicked by international visitors to your sites. It ruins my ad campaigns.
Sorry to say, but YPN did the right thing.
If I were an advertiser, I would be unhappy to see my ads clicked by international visitors to your sites. It ruins my ad campaigns.
I would, too. But why is YPN displaying the ads in the first place to those visitors? Is it that hard for them to geotarget?
Sorry to say, but YPN did the right thing.
They resolved the issue one way, but I would not necessarily say the right way. They did it the easy way.
I would, too. But why is YPN displaying the ads in the first place to those visitors? Is it that hard for them to geotarget?
agree. yahoo is such a big company and i bet they must have the right technology to display ads geo-targetted.
No.
Does YPN have to give a friendly second chance to someone who clearly violated the TOS since September and knew traffic from international visitors amounted to 40% in most of his cases?
No.
Longevity has nothing to do with keeping the publisher in question in the program. If anything, it made the author's case worse because he/she knew this was going on for that long of a duration. It would have been better if he would have notified YPN from the start and let them make suggestions on how they both could beneficially make it work. Instead, the publisher continued going on trying to get away with it.
The rule is simply to have minimal international traffic to stay with the program. "Minimal" being common sense.
Geo-targeting is off topic and has nothing to do with the original question. Your just heading into another direction to justify a wrong.
Was this publisher within the TOS of international traffic?
No.
Was this publisher within the TOS of international traffic?
No.
What specifically is the guideline in the TOS? I can't find it.
In the TOS it reads:
Overture's payment to you will be based on the net revenue earned by Overture from the Matched Ads displayed on Your Site and/or Your RSS Feed(s) to human users within the United States.
With the above TOS Yahoo makes it seem like they will do an audit and make adjustments rather than banning the users.
There is also this:
Section 11.l
Abuse of Services. You agree not to:
display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;
If you read that than even showing ONE single ad outside the US you are in breach of the TOS.
Then from the Welcome E-mail:
Please note that during the beta period, Yahoo! is only able to serve or accept U.S.-based publishers with a valid Social Security or Tax ID number, and with web site content that is predominantly in English and targeted at a U.S. user base.
I'm sure there are more things I may have missed but this should answer the question.
AND I KNOW YOU SAID NEVERMIND JOMAXX but it is always good to look at things again.
YPN actually uses that excuse to kick old publishers out.
Let us wait and see where this drama ends.
The rule is simply to have minimal international traffic to stay with the program. "Minimal" being common sense.
Can you tell me where this is stated anywhere from YPN?
As mentioned earlier, it would seem that every one of us is in violation of the TOS.
I only target "en-us" browsers with Yahoo ads. It's really simple to set up.
Why don't you just call your Yahoo Publishing rep and ask them yourselves instead of speculating?
Why can't one just read the TOS to see what it states? Wouldn't that be more official than what some person says over the phone?
I only target "en-us" browsers with Yahoo ads. It's really simple to set up.
If the TOS states that non-US traffic is not permitted, then you, too, are still violating the TOS by the way.
gary_h, I know it's not a perfect solution but it definitely does help.
I only target "en-us" browsers with Yahoo ads. It's really simple to set up.
Yes, but wouldn't you think this would be apart of the code that they supply us so we don't have to do any manual "tweaking" to make their code work? And where are the directions to do this? I didn't find this anywhere?
Here's a SSI solution but it can be done with php, etc:
<!--#if expr="${HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE} = /en-us/" -->
Yahoo ad code here
<!--#endif -->
Why the hell isn't Yahoo filtering it themselves rather than #*$! at publishers about it? I mean, they know where the request is coming from. Why not just serve up nothing... or serve up a public service ad?
It makes no sense to me for them to boot someone who provides US traffic. Even if only 40% of their traffic is US, that's 40% of that traffic they choose to just throw away. But if they did the filtering themself when THEY serve the ad on your page, they could still capture that 40%... AND not piss off publishers.
*shrug* Seems simple enough to me. I guess someone at Yahoo either didn't think of it, or didn't want to invest in the overhead of it.
Oh well... hopefully my piddly 2-5% non-US traffic won't get me in trouble. I mean... come on Yahoo! The internet IS international... DEAL with it.
-Alex
The rule is simply to have minimal international traffic to stay with the program. "Minimal" being common sense.
No, the rule is that any international traffic is not permitted.
If you use YPN and you get click throughs from international traffic of any sort you are screwed?
Why doesn't simply Yahoo simply discount the clicks made by internation visitors if the advertisers do not want them?
I am just curious what kind of steps one can take as a content provider to discourage international traffic.
It definitely seems like issue would be better solved at Yahoo's end than at publisher's side.
If you use YPN and you get click throughs from international traffic of any sort you are screwed?
No, it means you may be screwed. It still means you are in violation of the TOS though.
I am just curious what kind of steps one can take as a content provider to discourage international traffic.
As has been mentioned, you can filter out IPs by country, or by browser language. You can also make sure your content is only of interest to Americans, like writing about 401Ks, etc.
However, no matter what one does, until YPN rephrases their TOS, every one of us is in violation of the YPN TOS.
It took me all day but I finally got phpadsnew with geotargetting so that I could show YPN ads to US visitors and Adsense ads to everyone else.
I'm a little worried though, I haven't made a penny from YPN since I made it live a few hours ago, sure hope I didn't screw something up! LOL.
