Over at the YPN Blog Since they will be displaying them based on both bid and ad quality, does that mean there will be a bit better ad relevancy?
This a a great change for Yahoo's ad network and something I've been waiting for. I believe it will improve the CTR issues that publishers experience. However, earnings will drop as a direct results of the new bidding structure to allow ad quality appose to just a monetary bidding war.
PwrUps - Good point. Does better ad quality equal better relevance? How much does relevance affect the ad quality rating? Let's hope it is a lot. ". . improve the CTR issues . ." "An ad’s quality will primarily be DETERMINED by its historical performance—its Click-Through-Rate . ." Can we assume that the ads that previously received the highest CTR, did so primarily due to their RELEVANCE? Perfect blending is pretty useless for raising CTR if the ads are always way off-topic. kempozone - Another good question - Will we see lower overall earnings due to lower cost ads appearing more frequently at the top? Will the anticipated higher CTR be offset by lower payout? Or vice-versa? RELEVANCE RELEVANCE RELEVANCE = AD QUALITY If your ads are way off-topic, the ads cannot be "quality ads", no matter how great all the other attributes are. A surfer's mind is looking for something, and you attempt to force-feed her/him ad content that has nothing to do with the surfer's desires. Why not just say "try somewhere else"? Untargeted ads are not "contextual", at all. For ad serving, close your eyes and shoot doesn't cut it. The ads MUST be targeted, to achieve high CTR. I sure hope that YPN gets the "targeted" thing soon. And is able to implement it. .
Again, my opinion. Higher CTR should offset lower payout. I'm basing this theory on my experience with Adsense. In it's early stages, Adsense was paying out at or above the level of what YPN was paying last year. As ad quality and bidding structures changed or improved, earnings become less and less. Yahoo, apparently, is making moves to improve their advertising system and adopting Google's methods. We can only wait till Feb or even March to make any assessment of the new change. The change takes effect Feb 4. It will take time for advertisers to adjust to the new system and many will bid higher to regain ad positions. We may even see an increase in earnings before the drop. Just my O
very good points kempozone. however, i wonder if these new placement structures will be included in the content network side of things. its one thing to say that ad quality and bid prices will determine your placement in search networks, but they didnt exactly address that in the content side of things. ultimately, i believe that this will pass over into the content network. and if so, are those ad performance values seperated between search network and content network? i would think that they would be. so many questions, time will tell. ultimately, this is a sign of ysm moving in the right direction and ypn's trail to come out of beta. however, yahoo always seems slow with certain improvements and implementing this could become a nightmare for them and their algorithms to determine ad placement based on ad performance / bid pricing. regardless, this year should be interesting for all of us. jmo
Finally some quality written ads might start showing up... I've seen some REALLY awful ads popping up and I just think, "Are you Kidding me?" NO ONE will ever click with that garbage ad copy.
good points karagold and kempozone. I am wondering what karagold is wondering, because the press release seemed to me to be referring primarily to the yahoo search network not content network--although I am sure the content network data will be used in some way as well. But I think worries about "high quality but irrelevant" misses the point. What they mean when they say "quality" is simply CTR. What we mean when we say "relevant" is also CTR. I think any publisher would hardly be squabbling about relevance if CTR was 100% (assuming the clicks weren't fraud or curiosity clicks). It's not like there is some oracle at Yahoo who is arbitraily saying "this ad is higher quality than this one and so therefore will be shown more"...nahhh, the algorithm is based on maximizing revenue by factoring in CTR as well as bid price (and I am sure it's NOT a simple algorithm). Therefore if they focus on CTR it should naturally cause more "relevant" ads to show up on the content network. As for all of this signalling the end of beta, I think it's still a ways off. I think once they have this new algorithm ironed out and once advertisers have the ability to seperate bids for the content network, they will be able to roll out of beta. '08 is not unlikely.
Quality ads decreases curiosity clicks and will increase ctr which is good for publishers and also good for advertisers and ultimately good for Yahoo in many ways. The current system forces high quality advertisers, who must compete with MFA sites, to expend their budget quickly early in the day forcing Yahoo to show irrelevent ads resulting in low CTR for everyone and, hence, the reason publishers see the wild fluctuation in earnings and bans. Under the new system, the algorithm will determine what a quality ad is by looking at the CTR history, landing pages, user experience if Yahoo should implement a user feedback for each ad and other factors. This way Yahoo can determine if the site advetised is of high quality and increases the quality of the Yahoo Search Engine and seacher's user experience. By making these kinds of changes will Yahoo able to compete with Google. This will be a year of many transitions for Yahoo and I wish them success because I really don't want to see a monopoly.
I think YPN should pay more attention better their ads relevancy rather than how the ads look or diplayed... their ads are way off topic of the page they are on. Anyway... we'll have to wait and see what happens
There was a time when this could of happened. Yahoo could have bought Google but didn't think Google was worth the money... If I can find the link to the story, I'll post it.
I hardly doubt that...I think YPN would have given up long ago if they didn't think this would work...