Well, I have been with YPN for almost 2 years now and have finally gotten to the point where i want to give up! In 2006, I made over $40,000 from them and everything was going good till around January 2007. That month, revenue got cut again and I lost 1/2 my revenue. Then, in Sep 07, Yahoo decided to get greedy and take 1/2 my paycheck again by taking way my ad targeting for displaying "Books/Movies/Music" on an MP3 website that has to do with music, so I only made around $20,000 from them. This year, I am looking at well under half of that when I am still getting the same amount of traffic and the ads are in the exact same places. I went from making $300 a day to $5 a day....BIG difference. I have called into Yahoo and talked to almost all the people there and they all say my revenue drop is because of poor traffic being sent to the advertisers. Well, IMO, they need to put some relevant ads on my site that will interest my users instead of "Used Cars" on an Mp3 site. Unfortunately, I can no longer control my ad targeting so it is now all in YPN's hands on what ads are displayed. This only shows how much YPN cares about their publishers. If you are interested in getting YPN, enjoy the money for about 3 months....it will continue to drop until you can no longer pay for your own server costs and have to shut down your site. I have tried Google too, but they pay roughly .01 to .03 a click. There is no way I can afford server costs with that. I have VC on my site, but it hardly pays $5 a day as well. CasaleMedia only accepts sites that are getting more traffic than Bill Gates has money, so I don't even try to get in with them anymore. I really need to get things back up and I have been looking all over for another advertising company to replace YPN besides Google. If anyone has any ideas, please let me know ASAP.
Wow, amazing. I am in the EXACT same boat. I made about exactly the same amount on my site as you. Then they took Ad Targeting away and it was cut in half and now they only display 1 ad on my site at any one point in time and its FireFox ad. I went from making $300 a day to around $5 - $9 dollars a day. I also have VC and I can't make much more than $10 bucks a day from them. I don't understand. I go from making $40k+ a month to $600 - $800 thats bull crap. Does anyone have any recomendations at all? Are we the only people that are in this position or did they do this to alot of others as well?
It all goes back to advertisers. The internet was something new for them to try but they are not getting the return on their investment so they have pulled back. The decline in revenue from Google and Yahoo is a testament to that fact.
so are there any other companies that pay more than .01 to .03 a click and report more than 1 out of ever 10 clicks instead of calling them "poor traffic"?
wow, I am only making $1.5/day with YPN, but it's pretty staple right now. You guys were really making money. what is your monthly impressions?
my revenue has dropped almost every day this month - i am at about 30% of where I was in December. what is ypn thinking? the only thing that attracted publishers to them was the higher revenue - without that - they don't have much IMO
What are the guys at YPN doing? Are they trying to run publishers way? Well, they are doing a great job if that's the case. It's really a joke now. Hardly any updates. I used to make in the $100s a day, now I have 36 cents and not updated since 10 am. I might go back to Google and for good this time.
it seems like that is what is going on. I just got off the phone with YPN today and had a long conversation about this "quality based pricing" that is been implemented into our publisher accounts. It appears that if your site is sending "poor traffic" that you will not get paid for those clicks. So I asked, how is "poor traffic" determined. I was told that there is a backend system that is confidential that determines if the clicks are good or bad and that it is also based on advertiser conversions. Being my curious self, I created an advertising account on Yahoo and called up customer support to ask a few questions. First question was, if I do not get alot of conversions, will I still have to pay full price that I have my ads set too. The answer was yes. I then asked, why does the YPN side say that if the publisher was not sending quality traffic to the advertiser that the publisher would not get credit for that click? Would the advertiser still have to pay for that click if it was considered poor traffic. The answer was yes. So, IMO, yahoo has a nice little scam running to optimize the amount of money going into their own pocket. If you are interested in getting a YPN account, stop and think about it! Read all the posts on here about how yahoo really treats their publishers. It is not worth it at all. Google is way more reliable than YPN ever will be. They may not pay that well, but they will at least use lube if you know what i mean.
I think a publisher might actually sue Yahoo for not paying for clicks while charging advertisers for those same clicks. That would make a legitimate lawsuit in my opinion.
That is actually what i am working up to. I have a friend who has my ads that show on his site. Lets see how much he actually gets from my ads. I am paying a really high price for them too. Makes things look a little better on my end when I sue for a few mil.
Google AdSense and other ad programs will benefit greatly from this, Yahoo! really need to watch their backs at this point, that business is declining more and more all the time.
The best thing to do is to sell ads directly. E-mail to organizations with relevant advertisements. You can make good money rather than depending on google or yahoo..
I agree that selling ads directly pay much higher than any other programs do. It's the way to go. You might want to try other networks.
I didn't know there were so many people in the same boat as me! To me, some of this has to do with ad companies pulling back on ad budgets due to a slowing economy. Some of this has to do with Yahoo overpaying people in the early days. Some of this has to do with Yahoo scamming publishers TODAY with the poor conversions garbage! But, I guess it's our responsibility to drop ad networks, like YPN, and find the best value for our traffic. No ad network is going to stay consistent forever, so you have to constantly look for the bigger, better, deal.
Definitely go back to adsense if I were you... adsense made $1.6 billion dollars in 2007, and google paid 70% of it's revenue to the publishers.
That's ALSO exactly what happened to me. It was great in 2006, then 2007 was worse. Now in 2008 they removed my ad targeting (not like they can target ads without our help anyways!). So I was earning EVEN less. NEXT I received the good old "account termination" email from them due to "poor traffic or conversions". It should NOT be up to the publisher to convert for the stupid advertiser, that's the advertiser's job isn't it? How can an ad to play games or visit a site convert well? On top of this, the evidence that atokatim revealed about the advertisers still paying high CPC for ads that don't convert is a total BS scam. Yahoo needs to be sued and/or bought out to get fixed. I will never use another yahoo product again.
I just checked my earnings for the first time in a while, and it sucks now for sure! I've never gotten so many clicks for nearly nothing!
I wound up going back to google adsense even though i get a whopping $6 to $8 a day. wow! I am also running ValueClick and Chitika as well. Making a whole $10 to $15 a day off of my sites. That does not even come close to paying for my bills, much less server costs and advertisement fees. Yahoo sucks! period.