I wonder if anyone has NOT been paid for any international (non-U.S.) clicks they may have received in YPN. Has anyone had their actual check amount differ from their online totals? If so, how has Yahoo explained this ... or have they explained it? Although most of my traffic comes from the U.S., I have a fair amount that comes from non U.S. English speaking countries like England, Australia, etc. This worries me somewhat.
I have international traffic aswell. I assume Yahoo just ignores those clicks and never counts them in the first place.
Well, they talk about "adjustments" - this is what worries me. I've seen a number of people say that their checks were the same as their online totals. You would have to think that almost everyone has *some* international traffic. ... When I look at my logs, I actually have more international traffic than I realized. The U.S. is always at the top of the list, but when you start adding the smaller guys together, it makes up quite a bit. ... I probably won't get a check from Yahoo till mid-Feb (really started with them this month - December). I really don't want to send all my traffic to Yahoo for a few months only to have nearly half of it (in some cases) discounted. I would LOVE Yahoo if my online totals were even close to the final totals, but this game of maybe-yes/maybe-no is making me nervous.
Thats plain wrong, publishers should be paid for clicks and USA is not the only country in the world where people have credit cards. I think they should sue a geo Ip tracking softcore or somehting so that the countries from which they are not going to pay will not be shown any advertisements.
Well, I agree that they should never be shown in the first place if the advertiser stipulates that. But what Yahoo is trying to do is protect the advertiser. I can understand that. If I'm an advertiser in the U.S. hoping to sell lamps, or whatnot, I can pretty safely assume that someone out of the U.S. is not going to be buying a lamp from me, so I wouldn't want them clicking on my ad. ... But, you're right - they should never be shown the ad in the first place. If they are, then it's the publishers who are getting cheated - we use our space for an ad that we'll never be paid for. I wish Yahoo would make all this clear.
Sure man, the advertisers should not suffer either. I mean if they don't make money it will hurt us publishers directly as they will reduce thier advertising budget. But they should be transparent in the dealings otherwise it only leads to speculation.
Ok, I just called Yahoo. Here's what they told me: International clicks are not counted in the final total, but you will see international clicks in the daily totals. Therefore, you won't know your real total until 45 days (or so) after the end of the month. But - here's what might also happen: after the end of the month, they begin the validation processes, and so your available balance may start out small and then increase day by day as the clicks are validated. But here's something to BE VERY CAREFUL ABOUT: the Yahoo rep told me that if you have a site/page that gets a lot of international traffic, that you shouldn't put Yahoo ads on it because a site with a lot of international traffic can get your account suspended! ... That's plain crazy. ... And I had such high hopes for Yahoo. Now it looks like they might actually be crazier than Google.
That sucks man, I had high hopes as well. My traffic is mainly from the US but still not a very professional approach.
Interesting, thanks for letting us know. Not sure I have anything to worry about. I get maybe 15% UK traffic & some other scragglers. The rest is all good US traffic. I'm interested in what my totals will be once they allow UK clicks. We will all know someday.
Completely ridiculous that they dont filter out international clicks in real time. That is the most redundant thing I have ever heard. Its almost like YPN is pulling a chitika. If not real time, perhaps the end of day, but cmon, 45 days? Thats just crap. Nobody is a fan of auditing, But this takes it to another level
People.... You have to remember this is a BETA test. Yahoo does not plan to pay for international clicks in the long run but now that is part of the beta stipulation. If you get banned for international traffic I'm sure it is just going to be until they start paying for international hits. Remember nobody is forcing you to use the BETA you are doing it because Yahoo pays more than google. If you are that worried about yahoo's practices stop using it and try again when the beta is over.
Well, whoops. Guess I should have read this earlier. It was my understanding that Yahoo was just filtering out my non-US clicks. Not that I had to do targetting myself. Not so much. From an email I just received from Yahoo: We have terminated your Yahoo! Publisher Network beta account [ACCOUNT ID] for breach of the Terms and Conditions and/or Program Policies. Your breach includes but may not be limited to sending traffic from users located outside the United States, in violation of Section 11(l) of the Terms and Conditions. In accord with Section 6(a), we will not include such amounts in your payment. We have refunded amounts generated from the non-US users to our advertisers and will pay any remaining amount owed to you in accord with the Terms and Conditions. We appreciate your understanding.
I'll say it again - that's plain CRAZY! How can you control who visits your site? I can see if you have a site that's targeted to non u.s. users, then you can not put Yahoo ads on that site, but how do you control who visits your site? Grantmd - was your site targeted to non u.s. users?
Yes, have had the experience before. Maybe someone should write to them. Do they have the equivalent of Googleguy PR guy?
Not targetted to any geography per-se. I do have the ability to "know" the geography of someone visiting my site, and can therefore turn off (or replace) Yahoo ads for non-us visitors. However, I didn't think that was necessary, since YPN states they will only pay for clicks from human users within the United States. I emailed them back to request a clarification. Hopefully they'll reinstate me if I use geo targetting to not serve ads to non US users. But, yeah, crazy.
Yahoo does not pay for International clicks because the majority of advertisers are US based and don't want to pay for International clicks. I run several e-commerce sites and don't ship outside the US. I receive very little requests to do so because the shipping costs are too high. It wouldn't make sense for me to pay for traffic from outside the US. If Yahoo the current advertisers wanted to pay for International clicks, yahoo would surely offer it because it means more money for them. I'm sure there are some who are willing, but International traffic is less expensive and I Yahoo doesn't have a way to tier the payments at this time. Yahoo is working on Geo targeting and will offer a program next year. Since US traffic is more expensive, this is one of the reasons yahoo is able to pay more than google in a lot of sectors. A yahoo rep also told me they have a high rate of click fraud from India and China and are working on a way to filter these out. Right now, it's just easier for them to not pay on all International clicks- but I'm sure this will change. Yahoo also has a much smaller base of advertisers than google and they don't have enough depth in many categories for the US. Yahoo makes almost all of its adjustments to your account the same day, and the total shown has been exactly what they have paid - although I have noticed some very minor daily adjustments (less than $10 on $1,000). Unless there was a case of click fraud, you shouldn't worry about not getting paid what the estimated total shows (or very close to it). I have a few dozen sites running YPN and while the majority of traffic is US based, all of them get some International traffic. Yahoo doesn't expect that your site will never get an International visitor, and I don't do anything to discourage International traffic, but the percentage of visitors from outside the US is naturally small. The location of your sever affects the traffic you get, so you should make sure the server is located in the US. If you're running adwords, only target US traffic. If your logs show a large percentage of traffic from outside the US, you probably shouldn't run YPN until they introduce their International program.
So what you are saying is that ypn DOES filter in real time, or at least every 24 hours, when earlier in the thread, we heard different. So what is it? When does yahoo audit international traffic? from that 12am -3am PST gap when stats arent available? Or is it once a month? Someone call yahoo and get this straight, once in for all