Yahoo Publishing Network

I was approved to join the beta Yahoo Publishing Network advertising program for my A.P. Lawrence Unix/Linux/Mac OS X site. These are initial impressions:

I really like the ability to specify a category for certain pages. They call this "Ad Targeting", and it's a great idea. Unfortunately, the categories are severely limited, and you can only target a maximum of 50 URL's. That perhaps isn't too limiting because an entire subdirectory can be targeted, but it would be a whole lot better if we could stick some code on each page that selected the desired targeting.

Presently, the categories aren't particularly useful to me, but I hope and expect that these will grow. Additionally, YPN's ad inventory seems to be very sparse; I keep seeing the same ads over and over, which makes me hesitant to deploy this for more than a few pages. So, I set my ads to run YPN ads for about 20 minutes each hour (that kind of flexibility is easy when you write your own Content Management Code as I do). I won't turn it on for more than that just yet, though I am going to let these run more for the weekend where Google usually doesn't do well.

I do like seeing the competition: Google is entirely too unresponsive in this area, and seemingly has no interest in letting us help suggest what kinds of ads would work best on our sites. Who knows what our sites are about than the creators? Yahoo seems to understand that, and I'm glad.

As others have reported, the payout from YPN is, for the moment at least, much higher than Google. The ad payout really bothers me. It's way, way too high: almost ten times what a Google click typically is worth on average in my early tests. Yesterday eight YPN clicks brought in more than almost one hundred Adsense clicks. There's something wrong there: either Yahoo advertisers are paying far more than they need to for these ads, or Yahoo is paying publishers too much, perhaps to encourage switching from Google. In either case, it cannot last. I'll take it while I can, but I don't expect to see this continue for long at these payouts.

Psst - Wanna work for yourself?

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