YPN Account Terminated for Non-US Traffic

Non US Traffic and YPN

[oceankane]

We have been part of the YPN beta program since September, and have enjoyed great success. Other than dealing with the bugs on the interface and the slow targeting of ads at first, we have been impressed with the level of customer service and the revenue generated. We are long term successful AdSense publishers and have enjoyed trying both scripts out on various pages to determine which is the best fit.

However, we have been terminated from the YPN beta this past week, by email. The reason stated is that the we have violated the TOS by sending non-US traffic. This seems to be an unfair standard, as certainly every site in the beta is receiving some non-US traffic. We are a network of travel sites, and have worked hard on good old fashioned SEO for the past five years. We currently enjoy millions of users per month from top ten organic rankings under a number of very competitive travel and destination specific phrases. We also purchase traffic from AdWords, with geo-targeting set to the US, and through Yahoo's own Overture listings. Certainly, there are going to be some non US travelers using our sites to plan their travel.

I have read a thread here about YPN publishers having their account "adjusted" for non US users, which seems reasonable. However, it doesn't seem a good reason to terminate a successful publisher account. As I'm sure all of your can relate, it is very frustrating when you have spent countless hours integrating an ad script into your network, optimizing pages for that script, monitoring the performance, and then have the rug pulled out from under you so abruptly, when you have not violated any ethical or content standards of the program.

Does anyone have any recommendations how to respond to this? Has this happened to anyone else? Any words of wisdom out there? Thanks!

[bobothecat]

Do you know where this "traffic" came from?

Oh... and welcome to WW!

[yosaid]

It is shameful that YPN is loosing focus on little petty things like that instead of attracting successful publishers. Non-US traffic is something they should control interms of clicks and impressions.

Shame on YPN!

[garyr_h]

yosaid, I believe they do control such things, just like how Adsense can control invalid clicks. Adsense still bans right? So there isn't much difference. We have all read the TOS before joining the program... right?

It should be partly the duty of the webmaster to control such things. You can do this easily with MaxMind or PHPads.

You have to see this from the YPN Advertisers poits of view. The companies showing ads are strictly US based which are looking for traffic from US sources. Why should the advertiser have to pay for someone from China clicking on an American ad? Maybe that is besides the point you made yosaid, but still, webmasters have to have control of their traffic.

Once YPN rolls out worldwide there shouldn't be this problem, unless of course YPN is working on country specific ads... which then it'll all be messed up.

[added]
yosaid I do agree with you on how YPN should better control their ads (if that's what you meant.) They should really do what Google does and have the javascript grab the country/city etc. to display which ad is best for the individual person and for the website, not just for the website. It would only result in higher earnings and CTR.
[/added]

[ebuilder]

Did they say whether or not you would be reinstalled when they go global in the first quarter of 06.

[webnoob]

how much non-US traffic are you getting? i assume a lot for them to disable your account.

[ann]

My traffic is pretty much global so rather than get banned I just put the last page back over to A. Later, if things, and I mean a LOT of things get better AND they learn to police the showing of their ads I will return.

This is really YPN's problem as they are the ones showing the ads. I do not ever plan to restrict my ads, I am much too busy to even start trying different things like that when there are so many ad companies that are not quite so....dense?

[TruePaige]

Odd..what click % has to be foriegn for them to care? I get about 5% of my visitors from the U.K. and Canada..and that doesn't matter.

[sailorjwd]

Very disappointed to hear this.

If it was 'easy' to do the phpadnew thing I would have done it.

I'm probably next.

[Freeboi]

ebuilder, was there already an announcement that YPN will go global by first quarter 2006?

[DaveN]

ok oceankane, if I'm reading you correctly... the only thing you did was send YPN traffic .. UK and US .. and because the UK traffic was high they pulled your account...

so if I had a lot of uk traffic, and did a pop under to a YPN partner site i could get that partner banned..

I going to ask a friend on the YPN about this ..

DaveN

[yosaid]

To the original poster, were you making huge money? I mean, give us an estimate. I would assume YPN would go after the big fishes and not worry about the struggling sites.

I guess if you are a big fish and you are making huge money they will try to terminate you and find some excuse. And if that is the case the word will get out very soon and many successful publishers will stay away from YPN. Traffic is not something we should control, period.

By the way, Canada and UK traffic is generally considered "good quality" traffic when it comes to businesses in the US.

[DaveN]

Nah yosaid... other way around if you are making $30,000 a month then YPN are making more than that :) so i makes sense to look after the larger accounts

DaveN

[berto]

With my current site setups, because I cannot practically exclude foreign visitors from viewing my YPN ads, I have withdrawn all YPN ads everywhere until this issue is clarified.

If and when YPN goes global, I don't want to jeopardize my involvement in the global program long term because, in the near term, I might be banned for technically violating the TOS in this way.

Sigh. Is this YPN beta program a big hassle or what?

[ebuilder]

RE 1st Quarter. I was told by Y that it would probably be 1st Quarter. No guarantee. According to another moderator they are going to roll out Direct Deposit in the 1st Quarter. I would imagine it will be soon after that.

[sailorjwd]

oceankane

Are they going to pay you?

[oceankane]

Hi All,

Thanks for your feedback, thoughts and questions.

We have not received any information from YPN regarding the percentage of our traffic that was "non-US", nor any specific information regarding the payment we will receive.

I have spoken to customer service, and it appears that this won't preclude us from re-applying when it goes global in '06. We will try again then.

I'll keep you posted with any new info on the situation.

[oceankane]

Hi All,

Sorry for the delay in posting more about this situation. We don't want to go into too much detail prior to hearing from YPN what we will receive in regards to payment, and if we will be let back in.

We are hoping YPN does the right thing and lets us back in. We truly believe YPN made a mistake, as we have not violated the TOS in any way and do not have very high amounts of int'l traffic. However, the customer service guys don't have any new answers for us.

Just wanted to keep everyone posted. In sum, we publish a network of high quality sites on a number of topics, do not engage in any questionable traffic techniques, are a legitimate business with a store front, business phone number, etc. We are really hoping they do the right thing, and agree to allow us to continue in the beta. We sincerely believe a mistake has been made on their part.

[sirkei]

OK. i am really worried about this. I switched mostly ads from AS to YPN. Haven't got paid yet. Do you think it's better to switch back to AS first until this issue calrifies?

Any good tutorials on how to use maxmind or phpadnews for geo ip location?