Why Yahoo Publisher Network Is Playing Catchup to Adsense

on Mar 27 in General

It may go unnoticed but I can’t help but contend that on a main blog page, Yahoo Publisher Network just sucks.

The main draw to this site is that Taft Wordpress theme. Yet on this blog is a frequency of words that appears more than Taft. FileMaker would be one of them. A host of others would include music, Apple, software, cameras, etc. Yet the Yahoo search engine depends so heavily on frequent search terms for this domain that it completely disregards the relevance of displayed ads.

I can understand why incoming links are used as a basis for contextual advertising, but their weight in the algorithm seems to be completely skewed.

Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net has some interesting posts on the Yahoo Publisher Network but as it stands, it seems as though we’re one of the few who don’t have glowing praise for YPN. Anyone else have experiences worth noting with YPN?

Comments

  1. vkaryl

    Mar 27th, 2006

    Well, small as it may be….

    I’ve had infinitely better results from google than from yahoo. In a few years yahoo may be good. Right now google is GOOD. Yahoo’s not.

  2. Emile

    Mar 28th, 2006

    Rather than bitch and moan, I decided that if I have an issue with Beta software/web apps then I have a responsibility to inform the developers. So I contacted the support team through the YPN Beta Feedback page and received a fairly rapid response from David B, who indicated that if there are no advertisers found in the Yahoo advertising network for the content categories specified by me on my publishers control panel, then the results default to whatever keywords are the greatest source of incoming links.

    It took me a while to articulate that, and it makes sense. If I were building an adserving algorithm, this kind of error catching is smart. But upon further analysis, this has me note that I specified two VERY broad categories for the content of the blog at the blog root directory (swl.com/words) – those categories are computer software and computer hardware.

    Lets analyze this for a second. This is essentially saying that given the hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of advertisers that serve ads with Yahoo – the relevance search engine can not find ANY companies that advertise FileMaker, Apple, technology, etc.?!?!

    Is that to say that their only constituents are credit refinancers, cheap mortgage brokers and the like? It’s not necessarily encouraging…

  3. vkaryl

    Mar 28th, 2006

    No, it’s not, and my experience was essentially the same: pretty much the same response from “Wendy E.” at yahoo as the one you received from “David B.”, and a couple of pretty broad cats on my side – national parks and recreation opportunities, and local (to me) real estate.

    Disheartening. Real estate is a HUGE cat all by itself. All I was seeing was the cheap mtg. brokers/payday loan companies.

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