Dear YPN, dont make us wait until the 9th for your maintenance. we all know that you are having problems with the contextual targetting engine. sometimes you need to take a step back in order to move 2 steps forward. sometimes we try to improve things, only to make them worse. smart people realize the error and move back to the previous setup before trying again. we know your problems and patiently work with you through your rough times so that you can come up with a better system for all of us. we are doing our part to the best of our individual abilities. i have to say that in your recent "upgrades" you have moved the ball back to the starting line and have really thrown away 2 years of improvements in your targetting engine. targetting has never been worse. out of 8 ads (2 units), 3-4 are untargetted georegional ads, 3 are complete filler ads having nothing to do with my location or my topic and 2 ads are highly targetted. what is really terrible is that the 2 targetted ads are the last ads to appear on the last ad unit. these targetted ads tell me you have contextually targetted and matched my page. i know this isnt an inventory problem as a refresh brings up additional targetted advertisers in those last 2 slots. older pages seem to have suffered a different phenomenon. in some cases, old pages that have been extremely targetted for many months have lost contextual targetting completely, yet to return. in other cases, old pages have held on to their targetting without change or effect. and new pages seem to have the worst of the bunch with every problem imaginable. personally, i want to see you succeed and bring competition and innovation to the market. dont be stubborn. dont be embarrassed. dont let pride bring you down. there was a huge mistake made with the recent targetting upgrade. you dont even have to admit it. set it back to the way it was before and try improving it again. this "live with it until we fix it" concept you are employing is hurting everyone. forget about the publishers. you are hurting your advertisers where it hurts them most. while publishers can be patient as we can rotate you out and test other networks in monetizing our sites, advertisers will not have such patience. and when advertisers lose their patience, they are going to hurt you where it hurts you most. and by all means, under these circumstances, terminating contextual publishers for low conversions is not the publishers fault. it is yours. Sincerely, Loyal YPN Beta Tester
This message would do all of us a lot more good if it was directed to YPN customer support rather then the YPN forum at DigitalPoint.
Consider yourself lucky with 2 When I used yahoo for a music niche, there was 1 targeted, and the rest about random crap.
I am not sure if this is what is happening with YPN ad targeting, due to their resent logic of displaying ads with high CTR first we are seeing ads with high CTR(may be non relavent) appear on top and low CTR relavent ads getting knocked down.
digiseek, this is highly possible, though no mention (that i know of) has been made that those algorithms have crossed over and are included in the content network. many of my sites are perfectly targetted and have not been affected. also, its important to remember that advertisers are bidding on keywords / keyword phrases and those placement algorithms are based on performance of that keyword phrase. what i am really seeing is that the targetting engine is picking up the contextual target of the page and instead of showing ads that match those kw targets, ypn is inserting a variety of georegional ads along with the now notorious "filler" ads (2nd level RON). its not that the targetting engine isnt working. its that the placement engine is using filler and georegional ads instead of and/or before contextual matches. i can say with 100% certainty that this is not what ypn wants. this is the result of the last update they performed. i know they will fix it. eventually. and i did email that to ypn though, as jack and others have said, it wont make a difference. they arent stupid. they know.
I agree: Scrap the recent changes and move back to what was sort of working. I find it a bit annoying how polite their reps are but never actually say anything at all. Always saying "we apologize for the inconvenience". It's not an inconvenience its MONEY. If it's not working I am not making money. I am in business to make money like everyone else. So for now I have pulled the plug on most of the YPN stuff and run just enough to see if it will ever get fixed. At that time I'll slowly seed more sites and test again. I would imagine this is going to be in BETA for another year. I'm not exactly a huge fan of Google and their unwillingness to provide disclosure. Nor am I a fan of their new "suggestions". They implied I could make more money by removing blocked ads. Right. The spammy crap I'm blocking is for a reason.
Great saying man, I totally agree, what I can't understand is what takes so long. I mean adsense did it, Its just code, I mean sure its not open source, but humans did it, so another should be able to. Look at Kontera and Intetxt, they got it done.... Anywho thats my rant on the topic .......
i wish YPN come up with Parking offer. Have too many domains, not sure why they don't have that service. google has one. I am using sedo which sucks big time, I need YPN to open Parking pages. any one in that boat? Thanks
Well said. I have been with YPN since they started and they call me periodically to ask for my input, but nothing has changed much over the past year or two. I continue to hang in there, hoping something will change.... Phil G