How are YPN earnings part 2

Revisiting the question

[Clark]

Trying to decide how many sites to put YPN on that I'm in. At first it looked like people were earning double Google, but then I saw it was about the same. Now that some time has passed, how does it look? Earnings up or down? Are there types of sites that do better than others?

[Jenstar]

My first month-long test resulted in YPN earning less than $20 more than Google. But CTR is extremely low in comparison, although EPC is pretty high. Pretty much evened out.

[Clark]

I read your blog :)
Saw that. This is what's making me reluctant to switch everything over. Unless I can see more people with positive results.

[alika]

Income decreased by 40% because CTR fell like a rock.

[Clark]

That's not good news. Would you say the CTR is tied into the type of ads shown? Meaning the targetting of the ads?

[bnhall]

I've tried YPN on a number of different sites and I've found that in general sometimes it's better than Adsense and other times Adsense is better. This does seem to vary site by site so my testing continues.

[elguapo]

Related thread with regards to targeting
[webmasterworld.com...]

[JoshInTX]

Ctr dropped, but earnings are better then G. I think that yahoo is probably giving a much more generous split in the beta period then they will once it is out of beta.

[Clark]

Now that I've tested it, I can say it's a huge bust. And I don't trust the numbers. Something's off. Maybe they report clicks differently? Maybe they are better at discounting click fraud?

Either that or it's only worth putting one ad unit in there, because it could be the dupe ads that are slowing down ctr.

I'd love to see someone run a test comparing a page where they have only one ad unit and see how CTR compares w/ adsense.

The whole system contains no innovation whatsoever. Very unimpressed.

CTR is about 1/7th adsense.

[elguapo]

Only one ad unit here. YPN CTR is only 1/10th of G

[Clark]

Someone needs to do a sturdy test of this. Target a page to a non existent word. Put a page that isn't known on the web and unlinked to. Start an ad campaign for a different domain that they don't know is associated with you....ad of course is with Overture targetted to that non existent word. Then click your own ad from different IPs. See if YPN reported all the clicks.

It may be a little against the TOS. But there's no intent to defraud and it's to protect our own butts. I'm really curious if the clicks are being counted rigorously.

It's not worth it to me, don't use Overture at all (gave up on them back when they were still goto.com and royally screwed up my account)... and YPN seems like more work than it's worth...but if I were an SEO instead of a webmaster, that's what I'd do.

[FromRocky]

If

CTR is about 1/7th adsense.

or

YPN CTR is only 1/10th of G

, your earnings must be terrible even if the payout is 100%.

Do you think that YPN is losing money during this beta period?

[elguapo]

I have removed it from the homepage of my main site and simply limited it to a newly launched site with little traffic. Opportunity cost of running YPN over Adsense is high for my main site. I like YPN's payout but I am losing money from its low click through rate. The ads never change so there's no variety at all.

[andrea99]

If YPN can't offer a better deal right out of the gate they have lost the race.

People will switch for only two reasons:

1) To test the unknown.
2) To cash in with the known.

If there are no glowing reports from the #1 crowd, the #2 crowd will be too sparse to bootstrap it out of beta.

I hope they get that targeting thing fixed, their success will even make AdSense better for those who don't switch.

[Clark]

They aren't even ready for beta imo.
But you did miss #3. All the spammers that were kicked out of adsense will switch to Yahoo.

[newbies]

I hope they get that targeting thing fixed

The whole issue is not a mistargetting thing, but lack of ad inventory. That is why irrelevant ads are displayed. Totally nonsense. I am very disappointed at YPN. 5 clicks cost $0.67.

[janethuggard]

Yikes! This confirms what I have said for many years.

Beta, is a 4 letter word.

[Swebbie]

My take:

- Poor ad targeting (probably due to low inventory)
- High EPC (in my case, about 3X Google's)
- Low CTR (much lower than AdSense)

Net result: AdSense is the superior product. But if YPN gets more inventory and can target better AND pays out like it is now per click, it'll surpass AdSense (from a publisher's perspective).

[aeiouy]

I just got in and my main initial concern is lack of inventory.

I was hoping some of the category targeting would help me push ads in a more profitable yet similar direction as adsense, but right now I don't see many relevant ads for the one site I have switched over at all.

Guess it doesn't support the notion where someone told me have the adwords advertisers had left google for yahoo.

[JaySmith]

ctr down here about 10%.. but in my niche, earnings are up 30%... And my affiliate income is going up since more people are chosing that. Net effect, is ypn earnings up 30% from google and affiliate leads are up. Great program. I have rolled it out to all my sites and am keeping a close eye on it.

[annej]

Would someone sticky me the URL to a site that is using this? I'd like to see what the ads look like.

Thanks

[motorhaven]

Since they added the topic targeting I've seen a 2x eCPM increase. No lacking of inventory, or targeting. We're happy. :)

[bnhall]

for us, eCPM is awesome. Best we've seen from any program.

[Clark]

Are the people that are happy running one two or three ad units per page?

[bnhall]

We're running either 1 or 2. I do sometimes see dupes on the same page, but I've told YPN support about this. Hey - it's a beta.

[speedpro50]

I am running anywhere from 1-3 and I also see some dups. I haven't seen my CTR take a hit though much at all and earnings are looking very good.

[ganderla]

My CTR is rediculous with yahoo. I expect it is poorly targeted ads. I am doing some testing on an education site, and I am getting ads for chocolate.

Too bad targeting is not right on because I am getting unbelievble CPC.

[mrowton]

I've had results similar with most of your posts - a lower click through and higher payout per click.

I ran a test by placing yahoo ads on and area of my website that normally gets a fairly high click through rate with Adsense. After about 4 days it seemed that I was down about 30%, which isn't bad IMO if I can diversify more.

However I did another test by placing yahoo ads in an area that normally gets a low click through rate with Adsense. In this case the click through rate didn't drop as substantially while still providing higher payouts.

So I would say that in my case Yahoo ads do quite a bit better on some pages that already get a low click through rate.

The post about all the spammy people kicked out of Adsense going to Yahoo was very intuitive. I don't suspect that the payouts can remain as high as they currently are because of this. Also, as the number of publishers increase the payouts will go down.

Does anyone know if Yahoo will require approval of each domain after it leaves beta? If they continue being selective then the payout may just stay higher than Google overall.

Also, it seems that the Yahoo ads load just a little bit slower than the Google ads on my site. Has anyone else noticed this? If true it may have a bit to do with the click through rates.

[jeter4982]

As the others have said, my CTR is extremely low, but the clicks are substantially more than they are with Google in my opinion. My only issue is with the site targetting feature. The categories you can target are very specific, which is a good thing if you have a site in one of those categories, however Yahoo has also not included options to target some categories, which unfortunately most of my sites fall into in, so I can not get a real test going with site targetting. :(

Tom

[pflyers]

CTR is slightly less than adsense.

Payout is way higher. Will be moving stuff over slowly this coming week.

So far great program!