Well, a guy from YPN called me today for feedback. At first, I didn't have much to say other than it's a good program, but then I started thinking of the things you guys talk about, so I asked some stuff. First of all, he (and probably plenty of other yahoo employees) reads the forums, so he's most likely reading this thread even. They DO read what we say and what we want. Onto hopefully some insight... YPN coming out of Beta and YPN going global are COMPLETELY SEPARATE. YPN will not necessarily go global when it comes out of Beta. It could come out of BETA and remain exactly as it is....or it may be available to global publishers whilst in Beta. They do NOT go hand-in-hand like so many of us believe and speculate. The reason YPN isn't open to international publishers is NOT just because they want the Beta program to be exclusive to US publishers. It's because of how their sponsored search works. As (hopefully) everyone knows, the ads that you see on your site are pulled from the sponsored search results that you see when you go to yahoo.com and do a search. Well, the way it's structured for the advertisers is different from Google. Google has a bunch of advertisers who just advertise to the world while Yahoo has a lot of them that are targeted to a specific country. So, they can't go sending European traffic to a U.S. advertiser who has specified that they want ONLY U.S. traffic. According to the guy I spoke with, YPN doesn't really know how to handle this currently. They're of course working on it and trying to figure it out, but as of now, they have no solution. My two cents judging from the phone call: it could be a while before YPN is available to international publishers. Next, I told him that while some of us are geo-targeting, there are a lot of people who don't...and there's a big fear around the Web of being banned. He said getting a system like Chitika where you can show other ads to international visitors is on their Hot List. He said many publishers have said the same thing (obviously), so they're getting on that. He also asked if net-45 seemed OK or if it was too long. I said we're actually getting it sooner than that, but net 45 is decent. Any longer, and it would suck. But after the first one, you get a check every month anyway ...so it doesn't matter. That's about it....all I can remember anyway. In summary, it could come out of BETA and still be unavailable to international publishers. And if I was an int'l publisher, I'd forget about YPN for a long while. And last, hopefully there will be geo-targeting available in the YPN admin soon.
It will be intesting to see what they come up with then for something like Chikita as you metioned. You are also right in that who knows for sure when or if it will truly be global.
Nothing about click fraud. I also asked him about the high payouts....said we would really like them to stay as high as possible for obvious reasons. He said they have no intention of lowering the payouts when it comes out of Beta, but that other factors could affect it.....nothing we don't already know. I guess it's good to hear that they dont plan to purposely lower payments like Google did.
I'm not using geotargeting and this si going to be my 4th check and no issues, maybe it's because the majority of my users are from the US. Somebody said they only target smaller publishers, so this might be true
It would be nice to know how much percentage they share with the publishers, but I think big companies do not disclose this info.
did they mention anything about improved ad relevancy in the near future? I'm sure answers to this question would help ALL of us.
i got a call yesterday too. my caller did not seem as informed as yours and we did not get into as much meat as you did. i told them i'd like more categories and better CTR. i've got my dog picture site that i tried and removed it from 'cause there were no related ads. the clicks from adsense are not worth as much per unit but at least i get clicks.
He asked if I thought the ads were relevant. I told him that Adsense has more relevant ads but because of the higher payouts from Yahoo, it still works out for me. So, nothing was really said about the future but they're at least aware that Adsense is still more relevant... That could be simply because Adsense has more advertisers...
I would believe this to be the case also. They are a much smaller network at the moment and with being only in the U.S. this may be discouraging some advertisers for obvious reasons.
As long as the payouts stay where they're at and they don't go screwing up the targeting again I'm a happy camper.
I agree with that point of view. This past week has been my best so far. Went from my worst to my best so balanced back out LOL. To bad it could not have been normal to best, but hey it is beta and I have to deal with the good and the bad together.
I'm still looking into using YPN so some of this is a little foreign to me. I'm not sure I follow on this, regarding geo-targetting. Does that mean we have to geo-target our sites ourselves? Or that YPN forbids geo-targetting, or something else? And as for Chitika being on their "Hot List"... does that mean Chitika isn't allowed with YPN?
Since your site must be almost entirely U.S. based traffic and clicks you would have to employ a script to ensure that non-U.S. visitors are served ads from say chikita, Google etc.
I have seen a significant drop in payouts from YPN for the last 10 days straight. If this is a trend I will re-consider Google Adsense. They have been pretty stable with payout. YPN reached new lows for me yesterday on the same amount of traffic and clicks. Christoph
They called me too last week. Unfortunately I was really busy at the time, so I couldn't really get into any detailed discussion with them. I just told them their targeting wasn't that great, and they said they are working to improve it all the time.