Well, I got my YPN invite and decided to give it a try. For 2 days I took down Adsense and put up YPN. My CTR went down 5%. My earnings went down 75%. Perhaps I should have a bit more patience to wait it out a few more days, but I've had enough! Hope that was helpful; although I'm sure different niches and sites will result in different outcomes. Test & Track!!
Was it on the same days? (like mon-tue one week vs the other) Was your traffic similar? (similar uniques vs impressions?) Sorry just wondering, a little more detail on the test run would be helpful to all us non YPN invitees
You really can't make a valid comparision based on the findings of two days' statistics. However, I do feel YPN would get less CTR because their relevancy is much inferior than adsense.
i waited 48 hours for them to start showing relevant ads. never showed up. back to adsense for me for now.
It was 2 mid-week days, same traffic as I generally have on a weekday. The targetting was lousy. The headlines were ho-hum. Yahoo's section targetting did not include any categories vaguely related to my site's theme, so I didn't do that! They only have about 20 listed there. Perhaps one day I'll gather the guts to give it a week... like when I'm really wealthy and wouldn't be bothered by losing a week of Adsense revenue!
Some sites make more with YPN, while others make less. Ellen, why not create a free blog and throw some YPN ads on it. Build on your blog daily...takes just a few minutes of your time...and see what happens. You have nothing to lose really.
Thanks for the advice Sandy! I actually just put a leaderboard of YPN at the footer of my forum... will see what happens; I know forum CTR's are notiously low! www.raisingsmallsouls.com/forums/ - the targetting is way off!!!
Here are the title of the ads I am seeing on yours now: PC Support Get Free Legal Info Gruber Power > thats for backup power Start up captial You'll probably need to give it longer, I would go for 4 weeks to really put the test through its paces.
for some reason it seems ypn earnings have dropped a lot this week. most publishers reported all time highes on 8/3 then it has declined, now it is creeping back. you just had bad timing - most earn more with YPN unless you have some obscure niche. my revenue more than doubled when i swtiched to ypn, an their customer service actually will call you if you request it!
I've been experimenting like you with Adsense and YPN since YPN came out. I've tried YPN on a lot of different pages on my site. To make a long story short, I've always come back to Adsense because YPN can't deliver relevant ads the way Google does. Even though pay-per-click is higher, in general, with YPN, the lower number of clicks doesn't make up the difference. That's for my site; your experience may vary.
I don't think YPN is irrelevant, I think they lack the quantity of advertisers adsense has, which means crappy ads.
putting it at the footer will not help a lot currently the yahoo ads are way off the are showing pc and electrical ads.
Hi Ellen - I think that 48 hours is too short. Even if you use a week, which week? First week in the month, and last week of the month can be quite different. However, I do the same as you. When testing results are SO MISERABLE, why wait? I think you did the right thing. Yeah, yeah, some make more with YPN. But 90% do not. All you have to do is read a lot of forums. It is the poor targeting, absolutely. It is not that YPN can't target, it's just that they DON'T. They CAN give me perfect ads. 1- but they are not usually at the top of the results, and 2- the REALLY BIG one - extremely frequently, the first block of ads they show are TOTALLY UNRELATED. Refresh, and perfect ads. Can you imagine what effect that this has on CTR? Very few visitors will refresh. At present, YPN's greatest value to me (I learned this here), is- It is a place to put all your low CTR Adsense ads. This results in a much better CTR for Adsense, which results in a much higher EPC, and more money. If you have low CTR Adsense pages with little traffic, it doesn't matter much. BUT, if you have low CTR Adsense pages with high traffic, get them over to YPN right now. Wait a month. You will be amazed. In fact, if YPN were to go away, those same high-traffic, low-CTR pages will get another ad program, or nothing. Putting them back to Adsense is stupid. I've tested this one time too many - each Adsense retest just drags me down again. I have quintupled my Google Page eCPM using this method. This alone, took me from mid-single-digit earnings per day, to mid-double-digit earnings per day. Think about it. HIGH CTR means EVERYTHING to Google - MFA sites, which get the highest CTR of all, are loved by AdSense. Google's alter ego, Google Search, may claim differently. greenflag - Yes! Great 3rd. Fell off a cliff on the 4th. Bad 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th. It must be a YPN problem, and not a site specific problem. I have not seen this degree of earnings fluctuation with Adsense - except on extremely rare occasions of ISP backbone breakdown.