Reasons why not to use Yahoo.

What is yahoo thinking?

[EagleTalonTim]

After advertising with YPN for over 8 months now, I started noticing a tremendous drop in revenue since October 2006. Being as curious as I am, I put Google Adsense on my site for a day to see what kind of revenue I could generate with them. The revenue was not as good, but the clicks were 10 time more than what I had ever seen on YPN. I am talking 40 clicks on Yahoo verses 350 clicks on Google with the same impressions each day and almost exact same ads displaying.
After talking with David, Sara, and Nick from YPN, I found that it was ok to track clicks for my own knowledge. I built a script to track the clicks, but ran into a bunch of problems and could not track clicks from users who had IFRAMES enabled. Here is the weird part. On January 28th 2007, I ran my script from 12am PST to 12am PST the next day and recieved 101 clicks according to my script. Now remember...my script only tracks those who have IFRAMES disabled. According to the YPN performace report, I recieved 36 clicks on the 28th. I called Yahoo the next day to see what would cause this.....Their answer....They have filters that filter out invalid clicks. I just had to ask..."What are invalid clicks if they are coming from users on my site?". Apparently, invalid clicks are ones that are International Clicks, or clicks that are repetitive from the same IP. Well, good news Yahoo, I have an IP checking script on my site that blocks International users from seeing my ads. That is one out of the way. Now for the repetitive clicks... How many people do you know will click on an ad and find it is not what they wanted and go back to it over and over again?
It looks as though Publishers are not getting payed for 9/10ths of their clicks because Yahoo thinks 90% of the clicks are invalid....Or is yahoo stealing clicks and pocketing the money?

Another issue is the Ad Targeting.
On the Portal home page on YPN, it specifially states : "Question: Is there an easy way to better target my ads to match the interests of my users?
Answer: Yes. You can use the Ad Targeting tool to target ads based on your users' interests."
Beware Yahoo Publishers! This is NOT TRUE!
It should say : "Yes, you can use the Ad Targeting tool to target ads that match the content on your site to trick your users into thinking the ads are a part of your site which will inturn generate invalid clicks to the Advertisers."
Enough said on that.

Anyone have any other suggestions why not to use YPN?

[TammyJo]

I often wondered about this myself. Thanks for putting it to the test!

[Fish_Texas]

Same thing here...low CTR - same traffic - irrevelant ads...Yahoo is doing upgrade tonight (Friday the 2nd)
I hope they see the problem and hopefully the upgrade will fix it.
Fish

[garyr_h]

Honestly it has helped me more than anything. As long as you choose a category that is as close as possible to what your website is, you shouldn't have any problem.

[sailorjwd]

A funny thing happened more than a year ago when trying to get better ad targetting and ad performance.

I called Y and they suggested I use the site targetting hints. But he also suggested I select a more popular topic - other than the one my site was about. I couldn't believe it and told him that wouldn't be a good thing to do... he basically shrugged his telephone shoulders.

Today for the 1st time in a long time I've decided to block every ad that isn't on target from both Y and adsense. I don't care anymore about making the EPC lower. I'm just tired of seeing horribly targeted ads. I'll hit the 200 limit by this evening.

And for reduced performance - just to give a relative idea (not real numbers but real percentages). I used to make $50 a month with Y (2005) and $35 with G. Now I make $3-4 per month :(

[sailorjwd]

"As long as you choose a category that is as close as possible to what your website is, you shouldn't have any problem"

Ya, right.. my site is about software. Why do I get ads about car movers in Oregon?