Alex Gomes >> Blog

Yahoo YPN

YPN stands for Yahoo Publisher Network. Its Yahoo’s answers to Google Adsense. With an YPN account, a web publisher can put ads on there website and earn money. As of writing, Yahoo YPN is at beta stage. YPN debuted in August 2005 and is already giving Google a challenge.

I was one of the lucky ones or big enough publisher to get a Yahoo invite earlier this year (2006). I was amazed and little bit nervous putting YPN code in my website. After all YPN is still in beta. So I tried in one of my website. YPN is very similar to Adsense in setup and targeting. I will leave out the details of ad setup in another article. But here are some things I liked and did not like. After more than one month, I have got enough statistics to write a review. In general Yahoo YPN pays you more than Adsense. But the click through rate is worse than Adsense. YPN still has some bugs in targeting the right ads. But “Targeting Ads” function is really great for sites that have lot of flash content. “Targeting Ads” can target your site to defined category. The 45 day wait for pay check reduces your cash flow. But the pay check is bigger than Adsense. Here are more things I found:

Pros:
Ease of setup. Pretty straight forward.
Multiple ad units.
I really liked the Ad targeting feature, which is not available in Adsense.
Better CPC compare to Adsense.
You get higher priced advertiser.

Cons:
Content Setup is little difficult, I still haven’t dwelt too much into it yet.
Can’t delete channels.
Stat updates lags more than 24 hours at times.
You have to wait 45 days to get a paycheck.
Contextual ad targeting has lot of bugs.
The descriptions in the ads are too long and get cropped at the end.
Duplicate ads in Ad Units.
Reporting only on Ad Units as opposed to Ad Pages (CTR thus is under reported).

Remember Yahoo YPN is still in the beta stage. The folks at Yahoo are working hard to improve YPN and reducing the bugs. Its only the beginning and they are going to get better in the future.

Wikipedia Part-II : The Cluster

One of the most underreported news is the cluster of Wikipedia servers. Some people might even not consider it news. After all, what’s all that different than other popular websites?

Well, most of us have heard stories like the following, two college students starting a website with one server. Pretty soon the website becomes very popular and they are overwhelmed by the request. Then they starte adding more servers and became multibillion dollar company (Google, Yahoo, etc). But what you don’t hear is there infrastructure after they became successful. Very little is known about the network infrastructure of the top fifty websites and there is a good reason for it too. If you spend millions of dollars building your network, you certainly don’t want unwanted attention from hackers and even worse your competitors. Just to get a rough consultation of cost per server for your network, would run you in thousands of dollars in fees. And building your network at cheap cost is very important step in building your business. Even for me the learning curve was very steep. I started with free server moved to shared hosting then to dedicated server and finally to multiple distributed network. The things you learn on the way can overwhelm you at times. And I am still learning new things everyday.

Well Wikipedia is a whole another story. Probably for the first time we can get a glimpse of the network of a top 50 ranked website. And there are some amazing statistics to ponder about. For a while I thought the top sites require thousands of servers to run. But I was dead wrong. As of September 2005 Wikipedia has only 100 servers. It hosts approximately one million articles, 829082 users at 75 new articles per hour. That’s some impressive statistics. Even more impressive is the fact they did all this with approximately one million dollar/year budget. This kind of real information is a gold mine for webmasters everywhere who dream of making it big in the future. If you think about it, 100 servers is not that many when you are running top 50 ranked website. A million dollar is just a drop in the bucket for the revenue potential of the site. What I don’t understand is Wiki Media Foundation’s refusal to serve advertisement. The site could make lot of revenue by just serving one ad banner per page. They wouldn’t have to rely on donations. Well Yahoo is providing some servers in Asia. I just wonder what Yahoo has up in the sleeves. Maybe a future YPN partner?

Just when we thought that we had enough of apologies from the big companies, we are stunned by Yahoo. This week Yahoo CFO Susan Decker said in an interview. “It’s not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share.” So in other words, Yahoo admits of giving up in the search engine race.

What was she thinking? We know Yahoo is more than a search engine. But you don’t admit that you are giving up the race, when you are the No. 2 search engine in the world. Some say she was playing to stock investors. Well you are moron to invest in Yahoo stock if you don’t know the fact already. Yahoo is a content provider primarily.
But stock investors did listen and responded sharply. Not because they didn’t know the fact already, but because somebody in Yahoo is crazy enough to make that statement.

Well people in Yahoo took notice and soon were in full damage control mode.

In business, your clients trust is everything. Trust is something hard to build, but once lost, it’s really hard to recover. If you lose your client’s trust you lose everything.There have been two headlines that have hit the news last week.
First Google’s refusal to allow the Feds access its search records.
Second Yahoo and MSN’s compliance with the Feds.

Google has discredited its competitors by one lawsuit.
At the end of the week MSN was doing some damage control. After all, it doesn’t look that great if you allow access to your clients’ data to third party without any fight.

Trust is everything.

MSN Response:

“With this data you:

CAN see how frequently some query terms occurred.
CANNOT look up an IP and see what they queried
CANNOT look for users who queried for both “TERM A” and “TERM B”.”

Here are some of the comments left by people

“What if the Government believes that some of the queries they are now in posession of, which I assume they would otherwise only have been able to come into posession of via an authorised warrant, are worthy of further investigation?

Will MSN then release IP and user information? They will if they are compelled to do so as part of any criminal court case. If so, it can be shown that the direct cause of this was the release of the initial query data.”

“I WILL NEVER EVER USE A US-BASED SEARCH ENGINE AGAIN. This is not because you did something wrong in this case, it is because incidents like this make me feel less and less safe disclosing my personal info to any system that is within US jurisdiction.”

“The government is not the boogy man and as a parent I appreciate the intent of the DOJ data gathering attempt.”

“Does MSN Search actually record IPs with each search string? In other words, is there any sort of electronic or paper trail for each search that ever could be subpoenaed? Because whether or not that information is requested in this subpoena, if it is available at all, there’s a chance that it someday could be requested, and that’s a nightmare waiting to happen. ”

“No matter how you spin it, handing this information over to the US Government looses MS serious trust points. How can you seriously talk about trustworthy computing when you hand over this information without at least a fight or without being more honest to your customers up front? You’ve had since last summer to make a stand, yet it only happens as a PR response to the well deserved bad publicity MS is getting.”