It's Happened -- YPN ads have just gotten LESS relevant

Well at midnight last night I swapped my YPN ads with Adsense ads and I've already doubled my usual YPN earnings by noon. Go figure. Don't know if it's going to last, though, they never seem to...

 

Having a backup is great thing. At least I know what to do when things go bad with one network.

BTW - I'm seeing better targeting today.

 

I'm still on the same streak I have been on for the last three days...I hope it continues...

 

I've been testing YPN off and on for a year and a half now.

Feb 12th or 13th of this year the Ad Relevancy went south... way south. Again a week or two ago (I tested so little after the Feb problems I can not pinpoint a date) it went even further south.

Dismal click rates of 2-3% on aggressively marketed and optimized contextual advertising sites dropped to about 1% click through.

Ads which used to be partially relevant now seem to be totally irrelevant. Ads for Property, Chiropractic, etc. are appearing on sites that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject.

Adsense ads on the exact same pages in the exact same format and exact same (yes I say exact a lot to prove a point) colors are pulling 5-10x the click throughs.

It truly makes me wonder if they don't really know how awful the relevancy rates are and are simply testing generic unrelated ads in some kind of A/B testing scenario to get some kind of statistical information so they can serve different ads to different levels of players - i.e. low traffic sites vs high traffic sites.

Something must truly be up here. I just can't believe they would intentionally display irrelevant ads for no reason.

They may not have the rocket scientists that Google has on Staff but the turnip truck didn't just hit the bump in the road all at the same time.

For me I'm going to keep a few sites seeded just to see if anything changes. Then if there is a change I'll switch a few campaigns back. For now I'll stick with Adsense. They payout per click is lower the but relevancy so much better that it more than makes up for it - multiple times more.