Because of a trip I was a few days tardy in implementing YPN’s confirmation link. I received a phone call from a very unpleasant person who began taking me to task for not immediately activating my account and then launching into an unasked for and demeaning discussion of how I must need help in clicking on the link. I’m new to blogging but I’ve been on line since before there was a WWW, I don’t need smart Aleck’s to ‘walk me through’ clicking on a link. When I told her the time she called was not good she veritably barked at me, her voice dripping with exasperation, “Then tell me a good time!”

My response, perhaps ill-thought out, was to inform her that is Yahoo wanted to be that pushy when I was offering add space at my own risk, that she could just take me out of the program.

Time will tell if I made a dumb move but my goodness they need to think through their business model and the way they deal with their prospective publishers, or they need to in my view at least.

Any others have unsatisfactory experiences, or did I just catch this lady on a bad day for her?

Are you using ad targeting (where you suggest up to two categories per domain)? This can vastly improve relevance. You can also experiment with blocking specific ads. I’ve tested YPN extensively on about 4 dozen sites and the results range from fantastic to poor. If you can get relevant ads, the PPC difference vs Adsense can be huge (they can also be less than adsense). The CTR is always less, but when you have click that can pay over $20, the overall results far exceed anything close ot what adsense pays. Some sites average over $XX.XX per click – even 25 times what adsense pays. You also only get paid on for clicks from US IPs, so your traffic demographics can play a big role in your decision to run YPN vs adsense. I’ve found that YPN produces better financial results approximately 75% of the time – but that number really depends on the type of sites you have.

YPN also states that there is a promotion pricing in effect during beta, so PPC is likely to decrease by and unknown percentage in the future – after they have lured enough sites away from adsense.

But the huge upside is a vastly superior CPC rate. Where Adsense was giving me pennies per click, some Yahoo clicks are in the dollars range.

In an ideal world, as YPN leaves beta the engine will serve more relevant ads while keeping a nice, hefty CPC. *crosses fingers*

The only other thing I “miss” is the adlinks format. They are big earners by comparison.

I really don’t see where the ‘balance’ comes from though.

I switched the ad block to the bottom of the page (due to complaints) so I’m sure that will affect things a bit. I’m using this site for testing purposes before moving it to my blogs to replace AdSense ……

Blaine – yeah it seems to have improved a bit – hopefully performance will also as the first stat update was pretty terrible. Will give it a bit more time.

However, one thing you should be aware of is that you can’t have _any_ other ads on the page with your YPN ones and be in the TOS. I haven’t actually read it through since I’ve had some issues with it and never actually was able to get into my account, but when I got called by a yahoo rep on the phone I asked her about other ads and they said while it was in beta you could not have any other form of advertising served in the same page, including a deep link to amazon. She may have been mistaken; I was so fed up with it I never actually looked into it. That might be something to be aware of though.