New Termination Round

I got a call today about termination, looks like there is a new round of terminations... quite a coincidence that it's before payday, around the time of all the terminations.

 

They took money out of my terminated account , did anyone else get audited? How much did they take? Is this the last time?

 

did you get terminated Arctic? strange that they would call regarding termination.

 

weren't you just recently had ad targeting disabled as well?

 

I got terminated as well today, and I am a long term publisher.

 

Yes I did, right after I paused advertising... it seems there is something around to do with revenue, I've had similar things happen when I've paused my advertising and made no money for a while they seem to do something.

Since they turned ad targetting off for me I have made nothing and then they go and say they are terminating me for "low quality"... what the heck?

I mean it makes no sense, I've been with YPN since January 2005, and it's been a year and 3 months and they had no problem with the site then, and just said something about it now? Come on, they think I was born yesterday?

 

Sorry to hear that ArcticPro.

 

Join the club man, sorry to hear about it. Just get ready to get about 50% of what you made in about 3 -4 months. Yahoo is a crap company, they talk about low conversions, even though after they disabled my ad-targetting, I didnt use them for almost a month.

I don't know guys, YPN is starting to look worse than Google since they terminate people for "low conversions" even though its their fault for putting the "high paying" ads on our pages...

O, btw man, you gotta take those crappy Clicksor ads off of your site, I am getting a ton of popups. Smackarcade is the site.

 

I feel your pain. I got terminated almost 2 weeks ago after being with them for 1.5 years. It put a nice dent in my finances, but I am going to recover and move on. They are kinda pathedic anyway. they should have been out of beta a long time ago.

 

I wonder how many publishers they have left...

 

Now that's scary.

My account began around the same time, so this has me concerned.

When they close your account, can you reapply at a later time? Like after they come out of beta?

 

Heh, I might bemoan this latest news if I was still using them, but since I've switched all my sites over to Adsense again -- suck on it, YPN. No wonder their stock prices is plummeting into the sea. What kind of retards do they have running this company?

 

I got a call today that my account would be closed on monday for poor traffic quality. I have 40k in pending earnings. I have to wait 90days to see if they pay me anything.

 

ha, got the same dreaded email. been surviving for over 1 and a half year. finally got this coming.

poor traffic conversion? sigh.....

 

Wow, looks like they're really slicing their publishers in half this time.

 

I'm never going to really understand the "conversions" issue. It's not the publishers' responsibility to ensure conversions. That's up to the ad copy created by the advertiser, the marketing copy on their landing page, and whether YPN is doing their job or not in displaying appropriate ads for your content. All they're technically paying you for is the right to display their ad to your audience, and natural clicks from that... if they want better conversions for their budget, they need to be on a PPA model.

I was approved with them months ago, but never bothered switching. I'm starting to think sticking with Adsense was a good move for now. Even with better inventory likely, Adsense still has conversion issues though, and for the same reasons I mentioned. I can't begin to tell you how many ads I've clicked on (not on my own sites obviously) where the ad copy says one thing and the landing page is almost totally unrelated. No wonder there aren't any conversions....

 

Hi all:

I haven't posted much over here (Sitepoint is my primary webmaster forum) but thought I would chime in since there is not much YPN discussion over there. And frankly I've been looking for places to vent about YPN whenever possible lately.

I've been with YPN since the beginning of their beta and also got the call on Friday April 20th; I was terminated due to poor traffic quality. My heart sank, I spent all weekend trying to make sense of it and/or just deal with it and move on, but I was earning quite a bit and it is frankly a strong blow. I sympathize with everyone here. In reading some of the threads I am getting concerned about getting screwed out of a lot of my balance due to "invalid clicks" but I guess we'll see how it ends up. I was not terminated for anything that violates their TOS, so maybe I'll be OK. Still, now I'm a bit nervous about it. Invalid clicks can mean anything they want it to, and I hope they at least have the decency to let me keep what I legitimately earned. I abided by their TOS to a meticulous degree.

Anyway, my feeling is that I was making YPN tons of money and if they don't want me, hell with them. Though it pays far less, I'm switching all my sites back to AdSense and helping Google further cement their complete domination of the paid search arena. If YPN plans to come even close to catching them, cutting publishers like me loose is not the way to get there.

Also, I am an advertiser myself on AdWords, YPN and MSN Ad Center. Of course I want clicks that convert, so I totally understand Yahoo's position here. But we as publishers can only do so much, our visitors are who they are. Sure, maybe we targeted inappropriately to reap the benefits of the higher paying categories, but YPN gives us that power, so it must be expected. Also, it is up to the advertiser to have excellent landing pages with prominent calls to action if they want to convert, and obviously us publishers have no control over that either.

All in all, it's a situation that I cannot change, and somewhat understand, but am still quite bitter about. I knew when I got the call on Friday that somewhere, many other publishers received the same call, and here you all are. Yahoo seems to like to do terminations in phases, and on Friday, much like the classic psychology behind firing people on a Friday. What a wonderful way to kick off a weekend eh?

 

sorry to hear that. hope you get paid. i havent gotten the call yet, though i am preparing for it each day. of course, i have been saying that for a year. i didnt mind so much when publishers were getting paid most if not all their balance. but now, with publishers like arigold who are not getting a penny, that makes me very nervous. i dont have time to deal with not getting paid. if ypn loses all their big high quality publishers they are going to dry up and not have an adequate base to continue their beta test with. im rooting for you ypn, but if you axe me without paying me im going to be pissed. especially since i also run cpa offers and they convert very well for me. i swear i would laugh at them if they said my traffic was low converting. hello? ypn? thats your fault!

out of curiosity, were you using category targetting or contextual targetting?

 

Count me in. I got the termination email today... I was with then from dec 2005. This is really bad. Need to see if they pay me..

 

Thanks for your sympathy, I hope I get paid too. I too was always looking over my shoulder, just waiting for the day when YPN would come down on me like a hammer. Then, just when I eased up enough that it wasn't on my radar, BAM, they hit me with it. Getting back to payments, I remember last May there was a round of terminations and almost everyone who shared their experience said they were paid in full by Yahoo, even those with enormous balances. Not sure why Yahoo is sticking it to people and taking away most of their balance now, but I hope to not be a victim of it. You said it, if YPN loses all their big publishers then what? "Hey there Mr. Advertiser, would you like to advertise on our content network? It's comprised of 1000 tiny sites that get no traffic, but what you'll get should convert well".

I indeed did laugh/scoff at them a bit about the poor converting traffic thing. I called the person back who contacted me and we chatted for a while, I was pleading my case and trying to get more details of what happened, and why. My words fell on deaf ears for the most part, she wasn't giving me much. I tried to explain how conversions are affected by not only the traffic I send, but the compelling nature of the ad and the call to action on the pages that it points to, and couldn't resist throwing in some comments about their targeting. They did not seem to care though, at least the girl I spoke with.

I was using category targeting, for 2 reasons:

1) The default contextual targeting did a poor job serving relevant ads on all my sites, even though many of them were very content rich pages (perfect PPC ad food)

2) The contextual targeted ads always paid a very low RPC, and obviously most category targeted ads paid significantly more. Yes, the categories I chose did not exactly serve up laser targeted ads to my particular visitor base, but neither did the contextual targeting. If I am going to have irrelavant ads all over the place, might as well get 5x the RPC, was my logic.

Digiseek, really sorry to hear that you got axed. You have my sympathy.