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When I was on Yahoo I made cake, all of my friends on Yahoo are still making cake, and now that I was banned wew, I am making crap on google. In fact on average I would say out of everyone I know that has used google and yahoo, I would say yahoo pays about 5 times if not more than what google does...
so why do you all think yahoo is so bad when it pays so much better?
Or am I just cursed because I get insane clicks and like .0001 cents per click, it's gross.
While I do agree that google does a better job of bringing in relevance, that usually also means your getting some of the lowest paying ads depending on what type of site you are.
No wonder many publishers stay away from YPN.
Their targeting is so poor and their ad inventory so low (in my area) that nobody bothers to click on their ads.
If they do click, the revenue per click is higher than Adsense, but there are so many fewer clicks that with Yahoo I make about 25% of what I make with AdSense on the same page.
Ads for sun shades and new cars doesn't fit on my widget website.
Out of 350 pages i've found 1 where ypn ads a consistently on target.
And, the font of their ads doesn't look as nice on my site compared to Y. And, i hate the font so i won't change my site to fit it.
Yes, the pay per click worked out to be a little higher but the clickthrough rate was ridiculously low. As far as ad inventory goes, it's not a deep bench at Yahoo! so either they aren't targeted well or it's the same ads showing up on page after page.
If your banning on YPN had anything to do with clickfraud (whether you did, friends did it, or an unknown force) that would explain the higher earnings since you got the click volume. In reality, at least from my experience, real people just aren't interested in the YPN ads.
I still keep a small site on YPN, just in case if I want to give it a go again, but it just didn't work for me.
In the beginning, YPN paid huge $$$ for just about every category. My website was making more than I ever believed with the traffic it was receiving. Then came a switch up of how the ads were displayed (changing from highest paying ads being showed all the time to mixing in CTR/changing ads to see which performs better), resulting in less eCPM, then came geo-targeting, resulting in less eCPM once again. Today, the website makes the same amount per month as it did when YPN started out except it receives 5x the traffic. So as you can see, the per click has gone from way up there, to down there, but still above AdSense.
The problem with the earnings is that even through all the changes made - from adding the categories to basing it off CTR to geo-targeting - the click-through-rate has stayed the exact same over the entire period, only with YPN showing lower paying ads.
I do believe however, that certain types of websites have gained greatly from the changes YPN has made. The geo-targeting especially is a nice idea in theory, only the practice is a little off-base for the way my sites are. At certain times YPN has showed great targeting, not AdSense-esc but better than ever before. I believe that in due time they will figure things out. Heck, over the past month their targeting seems to come and go as if they are touching the dials trying to figure it out overnight.
AdSense
AdSense has shown brilliance from the beginning. Not only do they have more ways to earn money, AdSense for content, AdLinks, AdSense Search, Referrals, Image Ads and now PPC, but they have the targeting to go with it and allow you to show it to non-US IPs. And frankly, their UI is hands-down better. Hell, even setting up a new channel is 100x more efficient than YPN; all this and not to mention alternative ads.
Conclusion
I use both YPN and AdSense. YPN for US visitors, AdSense for non-US. As of now AdSense has the higher eCPM. I have tried on several occasions to add US visitors, only resulting in an overall drop of eCPM, less than if I use both YPN and AdSense (ie: without US visitors: 0.60 eCPM, with US visitors: 0.45 eCPM). YPN has a bright future if it can figure out when and how to use its geo-targeting and how to rotate ads based on CTR and how to add in newer ads.
The only thing we can do now is wait until the next YPN update. Who knows, maybe YPN has something big up their sleeve.
You agree not to:
<snip>
12. display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;
Are they serious? Do they really expect everyone using YPN to do IP detection and filter out your ads from showing to anyone with a non-US IP address? If you allow non-US users to see the ads on your site, you've just violated Yahoo's TOS and they can suspend your account whenever they feel like it.
Hmmmm..... I just don't think I'm interested in considering YPN any further.
p/g
Since Yahoo is an international business, what is so difficult about having international publishers?
I don't believe that technical challenges are the reason for the delay. It could hurt YPN severely if they launched the program outside the US without actually being able to deliver on the promises made to advertisers. Thus I guess they use the US as their test market.
For the non US publishers like us, YPN is nothing but the illusion.
Anyways, I am happy with adsense so why bother?
Yahoo is apparently unable to grasp the concept of my site, and somehow believes it to be promoting contraband materials, and therefore won't accept it in the program.
The bad thing is, I can look at Yahoo Search and see that my site ranks extremely well for its content (as far as relevancy). When you look at my site in Yahoo Search, the ads displayed in the search are targeted and appropriate.
However, putting YPN on my site, you'd think that Yahoo has no clue of what it is.
I've heard this complaint from many others, especially the mortgage ads - people who have car sites get those, people who have outdoorsy sites get mortgage ads, etc., etc., Read the Yahoo forums here and you'll see what I mean.
It makes no sense why certain ad types such as mortgages get so much weight.
Since Yahoo is an international business, what is so difficult about having international publishers?
While that IS an interesting question, what concerns me more is the comment sonjay offered about the YPN TOS:
12. display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US;
I am a US publisher with at least 60% of my visitors coming from 25+ countries outside the US. When I opened a YPN account a couple of years ago, I wasn't initially aware of that line in the TOS. Shortly after beginning some basic testing of YPN on one of my sites I began to hear about accounts being terminated for a breach of that clause and immediately stopped using YPN on any of my sites.
While I'm fully capable of "IP detection and filtering out ads from showing to anyone with a non-US IP address", who in their right mind would want to do this? Why would I want to use an alternative program that would exclude a major percentage of my visitors? What kind of arrogance is it that denies the internet as being a global community in this day and age?
A global philosophy and "geographic targeting" is why Adsense is better than Yahoo!
Chapman-
As I have mentioned in threads on the YPN forum. I still don't think YPN has the ad inventory to fill a broad range of topics. They are not growing their topline anywhere near the rate of Google and last summer they actually had a drop in ad revenue. You can't serve targeted ads when you don't have them.
I disagree. If I go into Yahoo search and look for my site, or look at my site's keywords, I see plenty of great 'Sponsors' - many of whom advertise through AdSense as well, and whose ads show up on my sites if I switch to AdSense.
The ads exist on Yahoo.com. They just get lost between Yahoo.com and our websites.
The off-topic ads make Yahoo look really dumb, and probably confuse my visitors. (Most of whom don't even know they are ads, probably think they are some sort of navigation).
Google ads contribute value to my site by being on target.
That being said, here is what the EPC x CTR part:
Yahoo: $.90 EPC / .3% CTR = $.27 payout per click
Google: $.30 EPC / 1.1% CTR = $.33 payout per click
So I end up making more with Google in the long run, even though Yahoo pays more per click. Yahoo could easily win me over if they made their ads more relevant and doubled their CTR. (Like, duh, just use my "ad targeting" selection, Yahoo). Then you would have this:
Yahoo: $.90 EPC / .6% CTR = $.54 payout per click
Google: $.30 EPC / 1.1% CTR = $.33 payout per click
So Yahoo only has to have HALF THE CLICK THRU RATE of Google to provide more earnings, and therefore start growing their Publisher business into a Billion dollar profit center like Adsense.
And I would love for them to succeed!
Are they serious? Do they really expect everyone using YPN to do IP detection and filter out your ads from showing to anyone with a non-US IP address? If you allow non-US users to see the ads on your site, you've just violated Yahoo's TOS and they can suspend your account whenever they feel like it.
Hehe, yeah, if they don't fix that we won't be having this conversation because YPN will be so small and irrelevant that it will not matter.
However, this has never happened and I'm probably showing Vonnage ads right now somewhere.
