Is Yahoo actively working on their Publisher network?? I've been in their beta program for almost a year now, and I haven't really noticed a single change or feature addition the entire time! I mean...do they not know that their relevancy is terrible? Or maybe I should rephrase that - do their investors not know that their relevancy with YPN is TERRIBLE and needs a major overhaul?? Has anyone heard of any upcoming improvements?! My CTR is so friggin low with YPN these days! It's driving me absolutely insane that I can't get back into AdSense.
hmm take your sunglasses off. there have been so many improvements its insane. the biggest improvement, of course, is Direct Deposit. this is followed by 20 - 25 minute delay in "real time reporting" compared to its previous 45 minute delay. there was also the addition of extra channels last year, a huge trim of "low quality" publishers (more money for us), improvements in their account security to deter and prevent account transfers and sales, their introduction of geo-regional ads (pita in my opinion, but on the right track) and constant / consistent improvements in their targetting engine ( though this still needs alot of MAJOR WORK before they can go international). also, they auto filter international / invalid clicks on the fly. this is a HUGE improvement as we dont have to wait until payday to find out that our earnings have been audited for invalid / international traffic. THAT WAS A HUGE IMPROVEMENT in ypn. it always sucked to think you made some amount and then they took half away on payday. now you know what your getting with minor audits in the + and -. considering the time this morning, thats all i can think of, though i know there are so many more little improvements out there. GOOD JOB YPN TEAM. give us 1 more year in BETA.
Out of all the stuff you mentioned, the only real improvement in my opinion was the real time reporting. Yes, that is nice. I give it up to them for that. Most of the other things that you mentioned should really have been there in the first place, like direct deposit. Filtering out international clicks sucks, and they really need to go international already. I have seen no improvement int he targetting engine, in fact I would say that it's almost gotten worse. And they haven't done anything to improve the Ad Targetting categories either. There may be a few new subcategories now, but nothing major. I love Yahoo. I'm not intentially dissing Yahoo at all. I love Panama. I just think they need to do for YPN, what they did with Overture.
thats what beta is for. to implement features, test them out, work out the bugs and move on to the next set. out of all the stuff i mentioned, Direct Deposit is the greatest advancement. you get your money on payday and not 7 - 10 days later. filtering international / invalid clicks is huge as well. now you know how much you are making without getting an audit on payday.
Adsense didn't have Direct deposit until a year or two after it went out of Beta. Their targeting wasn't great when it was in Beta and they didn't have live reporting until a while ago either. In fact, you couldn't even tell how much exact money you made for yesterdays work. You had to wait 2 days to see the channel reports. YPN is on the right track, they just seem to be going at this a lot slower. My guess is Yahoo isn't taking it as serious as they should be. The staff is rather small compared to what Adsense has. I'm sure if Yahoo really wanted, they could get this thing going really soon... I just don't see that happening. They would rather just keep the same people on it and slowly improve.
i tend to agree with you PoQ. what i really think is that ypn is finding this whole side of the business much more difficult than they originally thought. and on top of that, they had to deal with the Overture platform. and now, with the upgrade to Panama, there is a whole new slew of problems integrating in a fast way. there was an article posted here, from the Wired Magazine, relating to these problems where yahoo's various departments were working on their own instead of a team and now they have to try to bring different departments together to form a cohesive unit. this is not always an easy task to undertake. i would rather ypn take their sweet time and get it right then to rush out and put crap on the market. of course, im in the beta. im sure my tune would be different if i wasnt in and i had to hear how people are making a killing with ypn. jmo
My CTR with Yahoo is so low because of the irrelevent Ads that I'm constantly switching back and forth from Yahoo to Google and vise versa. If Yahoo just improved it moderately I'd make a TON of $$ and give their advertisers better leads. I hope it's a major focus for them soon. I am sick of mortgage ads on my computer tech related site.
karagold, I find that Yahoo as a whole has problems with not working together. I fail to see why they have several of the same products. Y! Bookmarks, Del.icio.us for one. Then it seems that the different parts of the same widget don't even work together like in YPN...
And Rhapsody Music for Free and Refinance with Bad Credit ... :-( I too think Yahoo still has a ways to go in the relevance category. Be nice if they gave us the capability to display our own PSA ads (like Adsense does) since I'd rather have nothing than their "RON" ads (like the above) which get displayed when they can't find a match.
I agree with natekapi. I've been with YPN off and on (mostly off) for two years and they've yet to improve ad relevancy. I've talked with their people on the phone a number of times, sent emails, and responded to surveys -- telling them again and again about the problems. I don't know if they just aren't listening, don't care, or can't solve the technical issues. I keep trying them every few months on a few pages, only to remove them from the pages when I get tired of losing my Google revenue on those pages.
I have a site that was running adsense and getting like 5% CTR. I switched it to YPN and the CTR dropped to 0.1%. But you know what... revenue went up 300% so I'm not complaining. Who cares if the ads aren't targeted. People are getting like 2-3 cent clicks on Adsense while we're getting $1 clicks.
Can't argue with that too much. Although we all know if they were targeted better we'd make even more money. Funny on one of my newer sites I recently engaged category targeting but still get mortgage ads 3 days later. All my other sites get targeted fine. The real problem with mortgage ads is that they stand out so much because A) they are associated with so much web spam and B) the word itself just stands out and is often so foreign to most page content. Nobody builds a mortgage site and puts YPN on it they use Adsense. The sooner these advertisers and YPN figure that out the better.
Certain niches with AdSense are getting 2-3 cents a click, but not all, so thats untrue. I'm not seeing as many $1+ clicks with YPN anymore either. Average is around 25 cents or so in my area, and its about the same, if not higher from what I've seen with AdSense. And AdSense is 10x more relevant.
I had an email exchange with YPN today regarding ad relevancy. I thought I'd share part of the response I received.