I've been in the yahoo program well over a year now and the quality of their ads has never been so poor. Despite my best efforts to target the pages within my website, I can't get relevant ads to appear. It has gotten so bad I'm now displaying ads for "Sexy dating service -"your town here"" on a page that is all about children. I've contacted YPN with my concerns and they've basically told me "it's in beta". I understand it's in beta for god sakes....it's been in beta for well over a year I told them. I can understand a program in beta maturing from its conception but this damn program is going backwards. The lack of communication has hit an all time low with YPN and their supports canned response of "it's a beta program" as become a joke at best. I've had numerous emails from my customers concerning the content displaying on my site some of which have expressed to me that they will not be returning. I can't afford Yahoo's stumbling and bumbling anymore! I have taken all YPN ads off of my site. I was hoping for a better outcome from such a technology driven company but, in the end, it looks as if this is just another failed attempt by Yahoo to enter a market they know nothing about.
hmmm i have same problem, or i can say had. but I change the in Ad Target and put the relavent topic and block that Sexy dating ads. That might help you.
the problem with blocking their dating ads, from what i've noticed, is that they are georegional. meaning exactly what diggs is saying "dating service 'insert city or state'". you cant block them all because you cant see them all. besides dating, i also get numerous other georegional ads that are completely untargetted on my targetted pages. while i dont have the problem that diggs has, it is annoying that i have highly targetted ads on my page and then 1 ad about dating (or some other service) in my state. the annoying thing is, that ad completely stands out when i look at my pages because it is just so spammy. if i wanted spammy ads i would use ad targetting. looking at my logs, these ads have the worst ctr i have ever seen on any of my pages. something like 1 in 1000 (est average) visitors actually click them. ypns biggest problem is targetting. it has been from the beginning. to all those that want ypn to come out of beta, this is not going to happen until they solve these issues. georegional ads are great as long as they are also targetted to the content of the page. while ypn seems to be moving in the right direction (in slow-mo), we are feeling the bumps and bruises along the way. we are the beta testers afterall.
I think they are losing advertisers...they have to fill in with what they have...I'm personally tired of getting vonage ads on some of my sites that have nothing to do with phones.
On the other hand I think that some publishers have benefited greatly from their lack of relevance, for instance all the 5k a month myspace publishers. Since, they are getting higher paying irrelevant ads they are making a ton of loot from the sheer volume of traffic and clicks. I have tried to use YPN on a few sites but the irrelevance was too much for me and I ended up replacing them with Google again, I am going to try them again soon, but I am not in a hurry, in fact my YPN account is at $90 so I should probably throw them on for a few days just to get the check. I am feeling optimistic though, I really like Yahoo much more than Google and am hoping that they will last.
On it's worst day I still make more money with YPN than adsense. I have still have sites getting over 100 clicks per day and making only $5 in adsense.... Gimme a break. I dropped adsense on most of my sites. I still try them on all new sites when I launch them just to see the payouts but they have never failed to let me down. I wonder how much I'd make with myspace sites if I switched to adsense. I shudder to think about the drop in profit.