If you look at Overture's website, you can do a search of keyword prices and what Yahoo/Overture is getting for these. Basically, Overture doesnt seem to have any problem because they're getting $4, $5, even $10 per click on some keywords.. and yet YPN is filled with irrelevant ads and low paying clicks. This makes Yahoo look very bad in my opinion... it also looks like Yahoo is incapable of properly implementing anything and thus cannot compete.
what does one have to do with the other? yes, for many, targetting is a problem. for many, they get low paying ads. but you cant compare overture and ypn. its 2 seperate animals. take a niche that has 10 dollar ads on search. lets say the highest paying advertisers opt out of the content network and the remaining advertisers only pay 25 cents a click and less to be in the content network. ypn takes their cut and you get the remainder. you cant blame ypn because some advertisers dont want to be included in the content network, or that the ppc they pay to be included is too low. and while some niches may have an abundance of advertisers in the pool for search, what happens if all of them opt out of the content network? you get either irrelevant ads, ron ads or filler ads. the biggest issue with ypn's contextual targetting is how it picks the kw phrase to target. once it does this, whether properly or not, it grabs ads based on that kw / kw phrase. if there are enough advertisers with budget in the content network for that kw phrase, you'll get targetted ads. if there arent, then you wont. of course, the real deal is that most people have a site about Topic A. there are a bunch of words on the page. the contextual engine picks up some random word or phrase and decides that is what the page is about. this causes irrelevance. personally, i have very little problems with this. this very problem is the only reason i can see that they have remained in beta. they are very smart to not release the product out in its current condition and create a bad rep. you always have the choice to not use their service. as for excuses, they dont need one because they havnt really done anything wrong. now if they went public with targetting like this, then all of us would want to know their excuse. im happy to be a beta tester - i hope i get another year out of them before they go public. jmo