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.
I currently profit very well from YPN ads. However I am concerned that this profit will dwindle down to a payout similar to google or worse when they leave the beta stage and open up the pool of merchants. Shouldn’t the law of supply and demand also apply in that situation? We’ll suddently have many more websites to publish advertisements for about the same pool of advertisers. Does anyone else have similar concerns?