Exactly its all about money and if they open internationally, then advertisers will pay less meaning your payouts will be less, and Yahoo will just be another ad network with low payouts, most will return to Google and Yahoo will loose money on long run. At its current state going international will murder not only YPN, but it will hurt Yahoo's revenue from advertisers.
To me it sounds kinda ridicalous. An American with a website targetting the Dutch market can place the YPN ads that adveristers here are willing to pay for but if a Dutch webmaster wants to place the ads it's almost impossible. There are enough webmasters outside the USA targetting US traffic. I think there should be something done with geo tartgetting instead of saying "Only America Rules" Other point is an advertisers view. More compettion means lower prices means better ROI for them which in turn could attract more business. Saying lower prices will destroy the market is unfunded and only repeating what you want to hear as it's in your intrest to keep the market in US hands. Quality of traffic and where it's comming from should be the rule and not your country.
US publishers targeting Dutch markets don't pay the publisher anything, as Yahoo only pays for US traffic. The decision to accept US traffic was made in order to keep international advertiser bids high. US has more advertisers then any other country so naturally inventory produced by publishers would not offsett this balance, or so ti was calculated. As many publishers are seeing now the rates are steadily dropping to near adsense levels. Yahoo needs to either start booting publishers to decrease available inventory, decreaseits profit share, or increase its number of advertisers. Those are the only 3 options available. Decreasing inventory by kicking publishers is only delaying the effects and keeping Yahoo from competing with the Adsense program. Taking a smaller revenue share would mean decrease in profits so I doubt they will go down that lane. My guess is yahoo is going to start advertising to get advertisers. Large vouchers, affiliate programs, TV commercials, they are going to be trying a bunch of things to get their client base up, so that they can further increase inventory. After they succede in bringing rates up, they are going to expand internationally but not untill then. If your a dutch webmaster don't get your hopes up, Yahoo will accept you as a publisher eventually, but my guess is not within the next 6 months.