I really think this isn't fair, if in fact it is the actual reason for the ban. Hope you get your account back. Does it matter where you get your traffic, as long as its good traffic.
I had a friend that google banned for what they said was click fraud...his daily $$ went from an avg of 35$/day to over 500$ on one day...google shut him down that day, he had been with them for over 2 years...they wouldn't even let him appeal...
This is because a spike is earnings is always grounds for alleged fraudulent activity. If he was averaging $35/day for 2 years straight, a $500/day spike would raise a red flag for me. In situations like these you must contact google/yahoo before hand to let them know your earnings might go up because of increased traffic/exposure/press release ETC.
I was banned last month for the exact same reason, same email. I called Eva at YPN and she said it wasnt a matter of click fraud or international clicks, it's just the the click quality was low. I was making $xxxx/month on my prize site with YPN. Now I'm dead in the water!
I hate to say it but I think it needs to be said. This is business guys. You need to treat your revenue streams just like any other business. Coax them nurcher them and monitor them. I watch my revenue and monitor my sites every single day throughout the day. Had you done the same instead of just pasting the code into a site and sitting back waiting for the bucks this wouldn't have happened. I'm not gonna sit here and coach you through the entire process but here's an example of what I did to avoid a problem like this..... I have a site that gets about 50% US traffic and the rest is from all over the world. I too get about 15k uniques to this site daily so when i saw my YPN revenue not being up to par with that kind of traffic, instead of sitting on my hands I investigated, and adapted. I figured out the problem and implemented geoIP targetting to send YPN to US visitors and everything else to Adsense. Now I get a decent split of revenue between YPN and adsense for 15k visitors daily and more importantly I kept my YPN account which i'm sure would have been banned had I not acted. So the point is you can't always just blame the ad companies for it all when the fact is you could have prevented this or at least tried to.
I have to disagree with you George. My account was terminated for "low quality" clicks as well. I was making mid $XXX/day with 12k uniques/day. I had geo targeting set up via phpadsnew. About 100 or so uniques of the 12k were international visitors when compairing stats between adsense and ypn. The problem is when your site is about topic x and ypn is showing RON ads, when someone clicks that ad, they don't really have any interest in what the advertiser's offering. In my case, the site was medical related, but was showing ads for just about everything but this certain medical condition.
I agreed with George until it happened to me. I was makign a killing and had a 30% CTR to boot. Low conversion is something that I have no control over.
Yes. It's called site targetting in your YPN account panel. If you see ads not being targetted to your site you should use it. If there is no category that fits you close enough then there is nothing you can do. My question is... did you do anything at all?
I can understand your situation is different. At least you tried. Again I still feel I should say that this is business. When you see your site x showing ads for site y that's the point where you pick up the phone or start writing emails. Worst case is then you at least have a record showing you have been working with them to fix the problem. Best case, the problem gets fixed. I guess I look at this differently because I plan to go full time webmaster very soon and I look at this as my livelyhood. Don't forget I'm not saying it's all your fault I'm just saying perhaps it's not all their fault either.
I agree with most of this. In my case, I do feel it's completely their fault. I did use site targeting, but it ended up showing worse ads than untargeted. I left it targeted hoping things would improve, but they never did. I'd spoken to my ex-account rep on several occasions about the untargeted ads, but only got what I feel was the standard, canned responses about not having enough advertisers, the program is still beta blah blah blah.
I also got terminated recently. Our site did a large volume with YPN. I also worked fairly closely with Eva. Eva called me before they pulled the plug. She assured me that it had nothing to do with click fraud or geo-targeting, it was simply poor conversions. I understand that if it doesn't convert than that's a problem. If advertising isn't working for us then we look for other options. They have the right to do the same on their end. I just wish they would have been willing to work with us as I think there are things that both publishers and advertisers can do to improve conversions. I would also add that although the targeting got worse, it wasn't as if we were seeing RON ad's. Our CPC wasn't abnormally high like last fall. It was very close to adsense. I saw no signs that would have pointed that we were producing a poor conversion rate and would have had no way of knowing. Anyone that has done PPC or CPA advertising knows that there are a lot of variables that can effect conversion rates on both advertiser and publisher ends. I guess they know what they are doing, but it doesn't seem like a good move on the business end to abrubtly cutoff a publisher thats done a lot of business with them since they started the beta program.
i'd imagine that the quality of your traffic must be a factor... if it's natural seo and links, how can you go too wrong with that? or maybe it's just that the traffic being sent to ypn isn't shoppers who are looking to buy.
if they are only testing there advertising system right now and they seems to cant handly there customers will they ever go wordwide.
Let me elaborate further. I have a site that doesn't get targeted ads. So, of course, I setup ad targeting for the site. Still, after some months, I still get ads that are not related to my site's content. And I know that the inventory exists, because I've seen YPN ads on other sites related to my site's content. OK, so right now I have unrelated ads running on my site, even though targeting has been setup. Do I get clicks on this site? No, I don't. I get about 1 click per month, if that. And that's what I expect, because the ads aren't related to my site's content. I keep the ads running because I think that the folks who run YPN are doing an excellent job with this beta, and I think that related ads will show up eventually. It's a beta program, so I'm being patient. And that's what I don't get. If these sites that I've been reading about were getting unrelated ads, then why were visitors clicking? Are the site owners guilty of fraud? I have no idea; most are probably 100% innocent. But is it suspicious? Yeah, kinda'. Bottom line: if I were getting unrelated ads on one of my sites, and visitors were clicking ads at a rate that looked strange, I would pull the ads ASAP and try something else, because obviously something ain't right. Could be someone trying to sabotage my account. Remember: there's always that other contextual advertising program. As always, IMO.
I don't use ypn but among all the contextual programs, adsense algo seems to work best. With some optmization, the ads can be relevant to a frightening degree. Besides, I think by the time ypn is out of beta, adsense will still be way ahead with all the new features/improvements etc etc.
You need to develop multiple revenue streams where the ball is completely in your court and not in Yahoo's or Google's. The problem with relying on Yahoo and Google is they can throw down the kill switch at any time and your gone. You can try to appeal but it won't be easy. Same goes for dealing with paypal .G et a real merchant account even though it is more work you have more negotiating power.