Yahoo Publisher Network: Sucks!
January 9th, 2006I joined the YPN beta a few weeks ago to try out on Singletracks. I set my site to display YPN ads half the time and Google Ads the other half of the time. Anyway, the ads I kept getting for days were for Vonage and golfing on Prince Edward Island, Canada (my site is about Mountain Biking). I also saw an ad for my own website! (I advertise on Overture) After several days of this I contacted Yahoo! and told them I was very disappointed with the targeting of their ads.
The response? You didn’t turn on ad targeting in your account settings. Well duh! I also didn’t add my own website to the list of blocked ads on my account settings. I chose the “Sports” category for my ad target and added my own site to my list of blocked advertisers. So this was pretty annoying but I did it anyway, hoping that the ads would improve dramatically. But they didn’t.
Now the only 2 ads I see are for Wrestling Singlets and (still) golfing on Prince Edward Island. I scaled back the ads to show only 20% of the time and waited a couple more weeks. Same ads, same crappy click-through rate (between 0 and 0.2%). Over the course of my trial (3 weeks or so) I’ve earned around $12. With Google I would have earned $200. So today I finally pulled the plug and stopped showing YPN ads. Hopefully things will improve once the beta is complete but it seems like there is a long way to go.
