Russell Beattie says if you’re not using Yahoo! advertising, you’re losing money. Since switching from Google AdSense to Yahoo! Publisher Network he’s trippled his advertising income. Wow.
I tried YPN on Autocross Addict for a little while. Almost all of the ads were for VOIP, broadband, mortages and real estate — completely irrelevant. I see the same ads on other sites, the Wordpress Codex stands out in my mind. I’m not sure if YPN’s ad inventory is limited, or if their indexing content targeting just sucks, but I switched over to AdSense and instantly got the kind of ads I wanted to see — primarily tire and performance parts discounters.
Despite the poor performance, I will give Yahoo! props for having someone call me about two weeks after I signed up. It’s not often that you get to talk to live human from a Mega Web Corp. Unfortunately I hadn’t put YPN on any of my sites yet and had little to say.
We’ll see how a week of YPN on this ‘blog goes…
Update 11/27: Russell IM’d to say that YPN has ad targeting options. I had noticed them shortly after I posted this, but they don’t seem to have made a difference — I still primarily see ads from Vonage and Lending Tree. With a brief look around Russell’s site — which serves ads under limited circumstances — I saw mostly the same. I’m left wondering if Russell’s results are due to positioning that results in high rates of accidense.
Update 11/30: With the move to Wordpress this experiment is has been cut short. For the time that YPN was active the click-thru rate was about 1/4th of what the AdSense ads had been getting and very few of the YPN ads were even remotely relevant.
