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hdpt, what was their excuse on your case?
Not converting well?
I haven't been booted but I'm switching all YPN ads, this is ridiculous.
Yea I got that same exact letter too. Here's the funny thing.
I was average about 1000 unique USA visitors in which I had a 10% click through rate with YPN.
About 1 month ago I decided to remove my YPN ads to try some AB testing with other advertisers such as google adsense and others.
On June 15th I added back the YPN code and on the June 16th I was told I was being booted because of lack of traffic/conversion.
The funny thing is the people who made this decision was not even smart enough to realize that my account was inactive for over a month.
The fact is Yahoo got what they wanted from us, paid us well (at first), then followed by cheap payouts and then final chapter dump us because now they are ready to come out of beta.
It would have been good business practice on the part of Yahoo to at least find out first from us what the reason was as to lack of conversion before they rudely dump us.
Yea me too about 1000 unique visitors a day with 10% conversion or 100 click average a day.
Believe me this has nothing to do with our conversion.
Its my opinion Yahoo has other plans or wants to move in a different direction and are slowly finding creative ways to get rid of people who participated in their beta program.
I think some of the other bigger publishers will agree with me when we tell you that 10% seems REALLY high for YPN.
If I were an advertiser, I wouldn't want to pay out $50 CPM if the site wasn't generating any actual sales.
You may have legitimate traffic and all of that, but if you generate alot of clicks, and no sales, it doesnt do the advertisers any good.
I honestly don't think Yahoo is in the business of ripping the publishers or the advertisers off in any way. They have legit reasons for almost all of thier actions, and have shown thier good will (as opposed to google) by paying the reminder of publishers balance even after they have been banned.
If they say that your traffic is low quality, and that its not generating sales leads, then I'd assume that they are correct.
Getting banned from any publisher program sucks, I had it happen to me with adsense for nothing that I did wrong, but you live with it, and you find other ways of generating revenue. A good way to test if you actually have sales leads is to sign up for somethign like commission junction and see if you actually make any money.
Given that your still eligable for adsense, with a CTR of 10% on YPN, your looking at double or triple that with adsense. Give that a try, and if you get banned, you know why.
My very best day, I barely managed a 1% CTR on YPN; and that was a total freak day... If any other of the larger publishers would like to chime in here, it'd be appreciated.
So you can't just say, for some people a CTR above 10% seems fishy. That is great if you don't get near that, but for AdSense, my CTR was WAY higher than 10%, YPN was a bit lower than AS.
So keep the generalizations to yourself please.
If I were an advertiser, I wouldn't want to pay out $50 CPM if the site wasn't generating any actual sales.
AdSense has for problems like this invented smart pricing.
I find this is the more friendly way to tell, that Your traffic is not converting good.
I wouldn't want to pay out $50 CPM
By the way, how is YPN calculating conversion rates anyway? This all seems wrong to me.
10% ctr on ad unit impressions(not pageviews) is very good for ypn, imho.
If you were selling against Google what would be your position? Selectivity, higer quality, silos of specilized publishers that transfers into better results for advertisers with a lower quotient of "Made For" sites.
The sites they drop from the beta are ones they simply discovered that they don't want that kind of site in the public launch. (after testing ofcouse)
They replied to me today saying that they couldn't reactivate my YPN account but encouraged me to join the program when it exits beta. Go figure.
Lame. This isn't a CPA program, the advertisers can lower their bids ya know.
I think they are carving out a select group of publishers and the ones that don't meet their paramaters they are divesting from their model.
They sell ads themselves based on cpc. Ever try to get a refund because of poor conversions... :)
I guess that would be the kind that makes them over $100,000/yr? Great move if I were a stockholder.
As a shareholder. I must admit that this ticks me off. They can compete with google here - I mean REALLY compete where they cannot in search. Why not take this opportunity and go for it?
[edited by: mfishy at 2:14 pm (utc) on June 22, 2006]
Man do I agree with you more and more. As a 6 figure YPN publisher who just got booted, I am glad I sold my shares a couple weeks ago (ironically before the boot, coincidience?).
If they can't figure out how to keep large publishers in the system they have MAJOR problems.
It's like dropping $100,000 revenue in Google's lap. That being said, I'm not buying GOOG long anytime soon ;-).
I would think a 6 figure "publisher" income (per month) from YPN would produce some really unhappy advertisers. I would also think that 6 figures translates into alot of sales revenue to be lost for the advertisers if it were producing. Wouldn't you think we would hear something on this somewhere on WW?
I dont' believe the size of this beta is so unmanagably large that they can't manually keep tabs on advertisers and publishers. They are testing the program, so obviously they are watching it.
IMHO, they have a reason for booting people from the BETA (capitalized for emphasis) maybe they are doing testing and your site didn't produce a result they were looking for so removed it from the mix.
They really don't even need to tell us why we get booted. When we volunteer for a beta "we get what we get" that is why it is volunteer, specifically for the purpose to test...and we benefit while they do.
This beta could end tomorrow and they could fold up shop on the whole idea with no obligation to any of us. It is part of the game.
They may have told you true, but maybe in a broad sense of the words. Why else would they allow you to resubmit later. It is just not what they were looking for in the beta.
They replied to me today saying that they couldn't reactivate my YPN account but encouraged me to join the program when it exits beta. Go figure.
I might be wrong, but I read this as:
- YPN has no smartpricing at the moment.
- Sites like yours (I assum they have a high eCPM but low conversions) are not profitable for the advertisers
- So, you are now blocked, but when YPN will exit Beta (i.e., have something similar to smartpricing) you can get back in, as your clicks will be discounted.
I guess that would be the kind that makes them over $100,000/yr? Great move if I were a stockholder.
Yahoo down about 20%, hmmm.... Did I predict the future, I am so glad I sold at 32.6 ;-). Maybe a good buy now...?
