Bye Bye YPN - The Yahoo Pathetic Network

I was one of those thousands of guys who eagerly anticipated the arrival of the yahoo publisher network. Finally, I and others thought, an alternative to adsense. No more being held captive to one dominant player in PPC contextual ad distribution. No more sleepless nights over whether or not you'd wake up the next day and find that your adsense account had been canceled (a couple years ago, this sort of hysteria gripped even the whitest hats in SEO as stories ringing with the scream "Google canceled my account!" seemed to proliferate in forums). We looked forward to the dawn of a new day in monetization.

Phftttt! Yahoo didn't deliver. In the beginning, their ads were not even remotely targeted. And their reps said, "Hey don't worry. The targeting's going to improve".

That was, I think, about two years ago. And the targeting's not any better. Why? Who knows. It could be that they've never gotten the tech right, although that doesn't seem likely since even adsonar (are they still around?) could target a page properly in the first hour.

What's more likely is that there's either a lack of ad inventory...or Yahoo's existing ad inventory is being kept for Yahoo search versus farming more of it out to their content network.

A lack of ad inventory might be understandable considering that Google is now a verb and the fact that everyone--publishers, users, and advertisers--wants to be there. However, despite Google's iconic status, Yahoo still commands a favorable chunk of the search market with a very loyal base that's been hooked into their services (e.g. email) for years (The loyalty of Yahoo's core may go a long way toward explaining the rapid ascent of Yahoo answers, in its various incarnations--Yahoo answers is a threat to many info site operators: see where it is 2 years from now). So I find it difficult to believe that they're that hard pressed for ad inventory.

Choking the flow of ad inventory to YPN sounds more likely. And why that's the case, I don't know. Perhaps they've never been able to get the whole "click fraud detection thing" down pat and, as a result, most of their advertisers haven't gotten enough ROI from their YPN ad campaigns and baled on them. Of course, bad targeting, whether its due to insufficient ad inventory or some deeper, more troubling reason, only leads to more YPN publishers jumping ship.

Here are titles from a few ongoing threads at WMW in the YPN forum and they are fairly indicative of the prevailing sentiment webmasters hold toward YPN. If yahoo isn't paying attention to this, it should. And if it is and is simply unable or unwilling to address the root problems behind this, well, I guess it wasn't meant to be that yahoo would provide a viable alternative to adsense.

Y Publisher Thread Is Dying (Looks like everyone is jumping ship)

Sorry Yahoo, you're just not cutting it (Removed Yahoo ads)

Targeting Woes

Saying goodbye to YPN

Ad Targeting - Yahoo please fix!

Yahoo names click fraud czar