Did I miss something or am I correct in saying that Y has not changed a single thing that us publishers see in more than 1 year?

There hasn't been much change for YPN the past year. The changes which do come to mind are: Direct deposit and easier channels.

It is still lacking in alternative ads, ad sizes, still no ypn search or ypn links/suggestions and of course not showing to international visitors.

It seems that YPN is trying to compete by providing a wide array of publisher services, as opposed to a quality ad network. In the past year they haven't made any significant changes regarding ads, but they have added additional publisher services; and you can tell from the polls and surveys that they are concentrating on publisher services such as driving traffic, analytics, etc. In my opinion it's just foolish; there's so many things missing from that ad network that are just obvious; there's so much they could do that would be better for everyone, but they seem to enjoy just sitting on their hands.

One recent "poll" had me shaking my head in disbelief.

"Do you want different ads served in separate units on the same page?"

Oh, of course not - serve the same ads over and over! SHEESH

I can't believe they really needed to POLL for that.

The only new feature I'm looking for is Ad Targeting!

I don't mean better ad targeting - just any old ad targeting would do.

If you give me the 1st 200 words on a page I'll target them for Y, and I'm an idiot.

Less than 10% of my ads are targeted even with targeting hints/categories. G targets 90+%

I was going to ask Google to allow me to put ypn ads on same page as adsense since they obviously aren't contextual targeted :)

They still say they are beta! That's a no change for a heck of a long time.

They called me last week wondering why I havent been using them..

Explained
Lack of Targeted ads
Lack of Ads

From my experiance per click is superior to adsense but the amount of clicks is half of adsense (due of course to their the lack adverts)

which leads me to question those of you that have advertising on Y ..is it costing you more than per click then on adwords?

Is that the reason for the lack of ads?

In my opinion Y's old user interface was just horrible to use. It would take 5 times longer to create a new campaign compared to adwords. And account maintenance was just horrible.

I think we'll see more Y advertisers since Adwords is getting more and more difficult to use and unpredictable. And, the new Panama interface on Yahoo is 10x better than the old one. I can create a new campaign now in 3 minutes and have it running instantly.

I don't see any significant difference in advertising costs between Y and G.

The problem is Y gives 1/20th the number of visitors compared to G. As for the good EPC - I suspect there are MUCH fewer Made For Yahoo sites on the YPN network compared to G. Also generally fewer publishers therefore you get much higher EPCs.

I think G's ad inventory is getting diluted and that's why there are such an abundance of clicks with EPC < 5cents.

The problem is Y gives 1/20th the number of visitors compared to G. As for the good EPC - I suspect there are MUCH fewer Made For Yahoo sites on the YPN network compared to G. Also generally fewer publishers therefore you get much higher EPCs.

yes ..that makes sense

Hi there,
We do watch this message board and we always appreciate publisher feedback. And actually we’ve been pretty busy in the last year with various launches, including:

• Compliance Manager feature

• New publisher portal

• Direct deposit

• YPN blog launch

• New messaging feature to deliver personalized account tips

• New Publisher Services Tab to help publishers build, enhance and drive traffic to their site

• Improvements in Ad formats (Ongoing)

• Reporting enhancements (Ongoing)

In addition to launching the features above, we also spent last year launching a new search advertising platform (aka Panama) and learning about our publishers.

Rather than build out YPN on the YSM legacy platform, we decided to focus on making our YPN platform compliant with the new search advertising platform. In order to do this, it meant preparing and migrating to a new Content Match platform – which we did.

We’ve had a dedicated focus on traffic quality and monitor how publishers perform in the beta. We've been doing this because we want to ensure that when we do bring YPN broadly to market, that we do it in a way that truly benefits advertisers, publishers and the web.

YahooSarah

Fair enough, those changes have been made, but with the exception of ad format changes (I believe you refer to the changes in design of the 468x60 format), they've all concentrated on the publisher portal. In my opinion, the publisher portal is absolutely fine, no problems there. I think what most publishers want is work on ad serving: improved relevancy, different ads in every unit, fresher ads, the ability of advertisers to advertise on a specific site, things like that.

Yes, the Portal is really good...Like It!
Ad revelancy is what we need.
Perhaps it will improve soon when more advertisers sign on.
Thanks for your response YahooSarah.
Knowing someone from Yahoo is listing means alot.
Fish Texas

Hey YahooSarah- thanks for pointing out those improvements to the network and responding to this thread. I do want to back up Broadway and everyone else here though; it just seems like YPN is not moving fast enough. The portal and direct payments are nice but what really is going to make a difference to everyone is the diversity of ads and how they get displayed/targetted. And it seems like adsense is just leaps and bounds better at this, with much better targeting of ads and a huge pool of advertisements to pull from.

I am still going to stick with YPN but I do hope that 2007 brings about some changes that will really help the publishers.

I have been asking about Adlinks for so long.

Yes, an Adlinks like product would be appreciated. So would more advertizers. And not showing the same ads in more than one ad block on a page would be nice too.

It's hard to give YPN pages when they perform so poorly, at least in my case.

I'm still hoping though.