Merry Christmas from YPN...and a theory about dropped earnings

I got a YPN Christmas email thanking for my support during their beta. I should thank them. With the returns I got from the high CPC they were paying. I say "were" paying because it has since dropped off to well before my previous G Ads. That is why I have given YPN a Christmas present by removing their ads and putting back the G ads.

On a technical note, I have a theory to why so many people are arguing about diminishing returns. It seems, and I may be wrong here, that YPN pays out very well at first, then they either lower the percentage they pay to the publisher, or they use something like the Smart Pricing algo. This happened for me about 3-35 days into the program. I was getting double digits every day, then it dropped a full order to single digit earnings. I posted on this before. My clicks remained high and the ads were the same, or at least very similar, so it wasn't because of an advertiser issue.

After switching back to G Ads, my earning are about three times what YPN was paying after the big drop. I'm not making anywhere near as much money, but this is the best shot for now.

My results were very consistent, as there was little fluctuation. Has anyone else seen similar or different results here?

 

You know fromy my past posts that I have experienced EXACTLY the same thing. I am now in the process of converting my sites back to AdSense.

 

I have not seen a continued drop with YPN. Recently I have seen a good increase.

 

Over what time period? I was saying the same thing in these posts until recently when my revenue started to suck.

 

My earnings have tanked as well, but this has been the pattern for this time period since 2003.

2005 is falling right in line with the same days as 2004 even though I was using adsense then.

I would give it a couple of weeks before you make major changes.

The force is with you Master Lee!

 

Same here. I don't know what's going on with Yahoo.

I am getting better CTR and more clicks. Yet, when I look at October earnings, today's are a fraction of those numbers.

Like someone mentioned, the ads are the same, the placement is the same, and people are definitely clicking on them.

Maybe you get initial high payouts when you first join the program.

As an example, take yesterday and Monday. Yesterday I got 50% more clicks than Monday. Yet, my earnings dropped, despite the pages having not changed at all!!!

 

I have seen a good increase as well. Perhaps the drop is just in certain industries.

 

My YPN has definitely gone down. About 50% of what it was a few weeks back. But it is now more in line with what I had expected it to payout all along. I kind of knew that the initial high payouts would not last forever.

Since I never replaced Adsense, I only added YPN to pages I was not using before, the drop does not bother me too much... at least for now...

 

I've made $0 with YPN so there is no going up and down. I finally took it off my site and put back adsense.

 

I can't relate...

YPN EPC = 10x of AS for me
YPN CTR = 1/10 of AS for me

They end up about the same... but DAMN they have a high EPC. I keep hoping and praying for better targeting because a guy could make a killing with the EPCs I'm getting.

 

That's the thing. As my CTR improved with YPN, my earnings dropped -- DRAMATICALLY!

The more I think about it, maybe its time to look at the ads appearing.

 

Someone explain? lol

 

My earnings have dropped as well. But I'm still getting more than with Google. That's all they want at this point, I guess. I'm sure there are a lot of factors involved (maybe). When they get out of beta and are a good 8 months or more into the program, we may be able to judge better (but, as always, things will be constantly changing). My guess is they will be as greedy as possible for short-term gains and try to compete with Google in a head to head battle - maybe beating them by pennies instead of dollars. This has always been Yahoo's M.O. They tend to ruin very good things they have going for them. If they only knew the true grassroots power of webmasters. Make the webmasters happy, and the rest will follow. This is how Google did it. They made the geeks happy, and the geeks spread the word. Do you think the average Joe found out about Google because of advertising? No. It was because geeks recognized that G had the competition beat in search technology. ... I'm still happy with Yahoo, but I don't have a whole lot of faith that they will keep me happy. I will then wait for MSN (who, I heard, may be partnering with Yahoo).

 

This means that less people are leaving your site! With Adsense, you would lose 10x the visitors.

On another note, the last few days YPN! has really tanked! I'm holding on, but it's hard, very hard!

 

yeah its tankd from the holidays people, why would advertisers spend tons of money when people are more likely to be with family and such and not on the internet.

 

You sure it's just the Holidays, mine started dropping on Nov 20 and is getting slowly worse every day, right up to and including today Dec 24, that has been almost a whole month of dropping. My traffic is great, only the YPN EPC is dropping a little more every day, how can that be holiday related for so long ? Most retailers online and off, make there biggest sales during the holiday seasons, so ad pricing should be higher now.

And from what I have seen, more folks are on the net this time of the year, buying gifts and browsing then they are during the summer months, including myself.

 

I think it's something else. Same number of impressions. 3/5 the clicks. Some algo changed.

 

I'm giving it two more days. My chart from last year shows that 12/24 was the rock bottom, and then on 12/25 it started to move up and kept rising until 12/31 where it dropped for a few days then went wild around the 7th and grew, and grew ....

I know this does not mean much in the way of what Yahoo will do (stats are based on Adsense), but it could give an indication of what effect other factors have on Yahoo, such as advertisers or internet shopping habits.

I do have to say that the drop with Yahoo is much, much lower than adsense was this time last year.

If Yahoo says that XX% of international clicks is OK, and international, not US visitors are the ones doing the shopping (clicking), then that percentage may have been exceeded and you're account has been penalized for the day and you’re just not getting paid.

 

December can be one of, if not the worst, time of the year for non-ecommerce sites. I haven't seen a drop in per click payout, but clicks are down per visitor which I believe is because people don't have as much time to browse in non-gift related sectors. IMO, things should start picking back up in January.

 

For what it's worth, I dropped Yahoo and went back to adsense for a while.
I'll give it another go in a couple of weeks, but I’m pretty sure the massive drop has to do with international clicks exceeding YPN’s tolerance.

When I say massive, I mean the type of stats that make you sick! Last night was just too low for me!