AdSense has been the King of contextual advertising for awhile. But, before AdSense, there was Overture…which was acquired and rebranded by Yahoo some time back as Yahoo Publisher Network. I was approved for the program a couple years ago, but haven’t done much other than toy with it from time to time. Recently, I had occasion to pull AdSense off a bunch of my sites for awhile, and I decided to give YPN a closer look. It doesn’t completely suck, however, it doesn’t match up well with AdSense, either…at least not on my sites and in my content niches. I find this sad…since competition is generally a great driving force, and MSN seems to be…well, who the heck knows what they are doing with contextual advertising from a publisher side? Anyway…regarding YPN, here are my observations:
- The pay is pretty good…at least on a per-click basis. I saw much higher payouts per click than I’ve seen with AdSense on the same sites in the last couple years (frankly, AdSense’s payout rate…at least on my sites…is pretty poor). I saw clicks paying many times higher with YPN. This seems to be good news…and if you’re on a site that pulls ads that compel folks to click on them, you can do well.
- But…their ad targeting is not impressive. I’m sure there are categories where YPN has a good inventory of ads, but they are clearly FAR behind AdSense once you get outside certain topics. AdSense does a really nice job of finding some level of relevancy…although there can be a “settling in” effect while they hone in on the target (this can take a little time). YPN doesn’t appear to have a broad enough base of advertisers….or else their targeting technology just doesn’t work as well. Even though I don’t care for the way AdSense targets some things, and I find their workaround confusing and frustrating…YPN is even more limited. They have just 20 major categories for ad targeting, and maybe 100 subcategories…which means that you’re pretty much screwed if none of those categories apply to your site. I tried experimenting with the targeting there…but couldn’t get any good results at all.
- No AdLinks-type ad format. In my experience, AdSense’s AdLinks can work as well or better than any of the other AdSense formats. In addition, they tuck in very neatly to a variety of web page designs. For some odd reason, YPN has not taken it upon themselves to include this ad format in their inventory. The closest thing is the venerable “ad banner” format, which at 468×60, is generally considered to be the most subject of all formats to “ad blindness”.
- Cannot appear on the same page as AdSense. This is one that really baffles me. Google has already said it’s OK with them, as long as YPN ads would have a distinctive look so they weren’t confused with AdSense ads. It’s clearly a limiting factor to the growth of their own program (i.e., less advertisers and publishers both)…so why hold people at bay? I don’t understand the logic here one bit.
- Sluggish/lame stats reporting. In my experience, AdSense updates about every half hour…so you can easily track how your ads are performing thru the day. This can be very helpful for immediate feedback when you’re tweaking formats, etc. And the AdSense data is always delivered with channel info right away. With YPN, the updates seem to be more like every 3 hrs or so….and you have NO access to channel data until the next day…so you’re always running blind for the current day.
Frankly, I have no explanation why #2 isn’t trying harder. The only thing I can figure is that it’s not a priority for them to grow the program…and they’ve decided to just tread water until they have a better vision…whereas AdWords/AdSense is Google’s bread and butter. AdSense continues to experiment and innovate…which is good, because I don’t see any other companies forcing their hand on this.
I had one decent day out of the 6 or 7 days in this test period. The rest of the days are simply embarrassingly bad…and it’s no surprise when I visit the pages and see the crappy ads they’re putting out there.
How about a dramatic statistic? The same site…two different days of the same week…one day with AdSense, one with YPN. Similar traffic. Exact same page positions for the ads. AdSense pulled over 13 TIMES AS MANY CLICKS as did YPN ads (and this isn’t a freaky statistical fluke…we’re talking about hundreds of clicks being pulled by AdSense). Yes, they paid relatively poorly in comparison with YPN per click…but I’d need a whole lot more clicks to compete…and YPN doesn’t show the quality of ads needed to compel anyone to express interest.
Again, I’m sure there are people in targeted niches that will have a different story. But while I will be continuing to use YPN, but I’ve had to head back to AdSense with my more productive sites…YPN’s poor performance is simply costing me too much money.
I’d say the #1 problem is relevancy, which is largely due to their limited inventory of advertisers compared to Adwords.
Another thing that I REALLY don’t understand is why they are so picky about who they approve. I applied several months ago and inserted the URL of a white-hat site that was averaging over 500 uniques a day or so at the time and they didn’t approve it. I didn’t hear anything from them anyway.
They’ve been in BETA forever and a day as well.
They’re definitely not happy with it so far or they would be out of BETA by now and building their inventory of advertisers.
Chuck,
Came to this site from Josh’s site (religious discussions post) and thanks for this comparison. I was getting smart priced with Adsense, big time. Switched to YPN and was doing pretty good. Switched back to Adsense for a comparison, and I can see what you mean about the PPC pricing.
YPN was paying out around .10 on a 468 content ad on the bottom of the content section. Adsense is paying .02 per click. Lousy!
Thanks for the support and explanation about this! New reader here!
Elliott’s last blog post..Bookmarking Demon One Month Review
It’s no good to have Adsense as a monopoly of this market so if any credible competitor emerges, it should be encouraged. But in the case of YPN, I have heard much about its deficiencies and comments that Google rankings drop when folks add YPN ads on their sites/blogs.
I wonder if anyone had such experiences?
I’m still waiting for them to come out of beta testing as I live in the UK and during beta testing they don’t allow foreign accounts. So I’m still with google.
I’ve heard YPN pays higher than google. I’m sure they will catch up eventually.
Daves last blog post..Delicious BBQ ribs
It seems that at least in this case Google loose the battle and YPN gives better benefits. How ironic!.
A friend of mine recommended me to try Google Adsense because his personal experience is they offer really what they promise. I have to find out for myself.
I actually came to the same conclusion, pay was on par with adsense on my sites, but relevant ad’s were not showing up.
johans last blog post..How Does Zara Clothing Compare To Designer Clothing?
I think this article should be number one in a Google search for YPN vs Adsense because you hit all the nails on the heads.
The only other thing I would ad is that you can actually call YPN on the phone and talk to them! I have a couple of times.
And I hate to jinx this but YPN’s targeting might be getting better.
If YPN ever got their targeting down they could actually challenge Adsense.
Sabres last blog post..Google, SEO and Social Media
I’ve been using yahoo publisher on one of my sites for months just as a test and I agree with your comparison. Adsense is best.
Adsense will always beat YPN on every level. Google are just too dominant, too smart, too intuitive and too aware to be beaten in their own game. This is with the exception of payouts, but hey, if your that good and you know your competitor is that bad, then you know you can get away with it and that’s exactly what they are doing.