Find Out What Yahoo’s YPN Ads are Really Like

By nickwAdvertising

My friend Loren Baker over at SEJ has commited to a 7 day test of Yahoo’s YPN contextual ad system. That post, from his third day in the test, makes for pretty interesting reading if you’ve not tried YPN on your blogs.

Loren asserts that the contextual targeting improved from dismal on day one, to pretty damn good on day three. Talking about day one he says…

“If we had not made the commitment to stick with YPN for one week we would have probably switched back to Google AdSense”

Apparently the quick turnaround on targeting was due to some pretty spiffy customer service, but it makes you wonder how that’s going to scale when Y! finally open the doors and let the rest of the world play

Ms. Holland shot me back an email early that morning stating that the relevancy problem had been fixed and she would be monitoring Search Engine Journal throughout the day to enhance the contextual targeting. Now that my friends is excellent and swift customer service!

I can’t imagine that happening when they have hundreds of thousands of users in the system…

I’d be interested to hear the Performancng publishers points of view and experiences on YPN, so if you’ve tried them, or are currently using them, tell us about your experience.

powered by performancing firefox

7 thoughts on “Find Out What Yahoo’s YPN Ads are Really Like”

  1. i’ve had to contact adsense multiple times re: horrible targeting of my website. they claim it’s because of insufficient content on which to target, but that’s b.s. in many of the cases. i get defaulted down to crap “rss” and “blogs” ads.

  3. I’m on Day 5 with YPN on my small sports-related (hobby) blog and the matching is dismal. But … I’ve only enabled them on single post displays, and I suspect there aren’t many of those given my traffic level and the fact that the home page has the most recent 8 posts.

    So I’m going to enable YPN a bit more extensively this weekend and see if it gets better. Might also put them on my Small Business SEM blog, too. We’ll see.

  4. Matt, I probably should have mentioned somewhere on my blog that I’m experiencing some incredible headaches with my commenting system and hope to have comments working this weekend.

    UPDATE

    Matt & Others, I’ve fixed the problem and comments are now working (for the time being). I really should go to WordCamp this weekend

    Thanks, Loren

  5. I wish Loren would enable comments on his initial post you mentioned, or his follow-up post at http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3690

    Because I wanted to say that Loren’s probably getting a skewed experience: he contacted Y! on the first day. As an influential search blogger who advertised that he’s doing a one-week trial to deliver a verdict on YPN, he’s probably getting even better customer service than an average YPN publisher right now.

    And just to be clear, I don’t begrudge if Yahoo! is keeping an eye on his site to make sure that targeting is ultra-good this week. That’s just smart business for them. But it would be interesting (maybe even linkbait-y?) if someone wanted to do a week with YPN without alerting them, and then write that up. Dan Kramer, are you listening? 😉

  6. yeh, it would certainly be nice to think that come full rollout they did have stella customer support though wouldn’t it?

  7. Presumeably Yahoo is spending a lot of time offering dedicated customer service now so that when they roll out the programme fully they’ll have fixed most of the relevancy issues and won’t get as many people emailing them with problems.

Comments are closed.