Understand your frustration...but the fact is...IMO
Yahoo does not have the advertisers.
They can't show ads they don't have.

Take a look at their own ads on Yahoo Search...not good.

IMO... in January many advertisers dumped them for G.

Personally, I'm very disappointed by this but I'll keep them on one of my sites and hope for the best.
Perhaps in a few months things will turn around...hopefully.
Fish Texas

I see the dreaded vonage ads today which I blocked over a year ago. I just went over my pages with ypn and not one targeted ad. I'm very disappointed. I wanted to keep a few sites for ypn, but it's just getting ridicules.

I was hoping it will get better over time but it don't look like it.

I think the challenge with our ads is that they are using geo-targeting first, then trying to match content targeting. I'm seeing plastic surgery ads for our state...makes no sense and looks cheap.

Even though Geo-targeting is really not useful for our subject matter, it would be better to search for content target first, then (if available) go to geo-targeting.

Some people looking for information relating to our content don't have the services available in their area, but they still may want the service even though it's not close by.

Content Match first - Geo-Target second.

[edited by: TammyJo at 5:26 pm (utc) on April 7, 2007]

I agree with Fish_Texas. They've got no ad inventory. That's the dirty little secret.

I agree with Fish_Texas. They've got no ad inventory. That's the dirty little secret.

If I go to www.yahoo.com and do a search on my site, or search on keywords relevant to my site, under the "Sponsor Results", there are tons of relevant results.

In fact, the "Sponsor Results" turn up some of the same companies that show up on my site if I switch to AdSense, or if I search on Google on my site or on keywords.

There is a disconnect somewhere between what we see on Yahoo.com in the search results, and the ads that end up on our sites.

Am I dreaming, or is the revelancy improving?
Feedback please...
Fish Texas

One thing to bear in mind about YSM targetting is that even those with XML feeds from them get pretty bad targetting on longer search phrasing (We know this first hand).

Send a phrase with 6 words in it and you are likely to get pretty poor results.

This means that the algo for extracting the context of a page needs to provide not only an accurate results, but a short one too. Yahoo clearly cannot do this yet.

If you want to get a better idea of what the Yahoo contextual algo outputs try popping over to their search api pages and look for their context stuff ( [developer.yahoo.com...] ), you can run content through their system to try and pick out relevant phrases. It would be interesting to see if your content throws up the same oddities through their API as it does through YPN.

One thing I've just noticed. It appears Y has thrown out all their previous knowledge of pages (some time over the last 6 weeks) and may be starting over with a new algorithm

I just turned Y on and see identical run of network ads on every page (100% off target). I tickled a bunch of pages and then turned off Y again. I'll turn it back on later and maybe they will have re-analyzed the pages. (and show better ads)

Strange. Sometimes I visit our home page and there are the "sorta" on target ads, then come back an hour later and there is one on target and another off.

What I am really noticing is the value of the clicks have been cut in half. I know my industry and there is no way that at this time of year people would be paying "LESS" for advertising. Our clicks are the same. I haven't been seeing any geotargeted ads over the last couple days, which is good because they seemed to be the off topic ads.

Note: Just today I've seen a couple big hitter advertisers so maybe something is happening :)

We're seeing new advertisers today and all on target. Earnings are up. We'd been running the same advertisers over and over for the last three months, dropping our CTR since we get a lot of repeat traffic, so new adverts are good news. I hope it continues. Something must have happened last night.

I'm seeing the same thing as ember. Better ads for sure, especially where we have targeting set. Yea!

Yesterday we noticed better ads on the site and almost doubled our clicks, the strange thing was the cost per click was WAAAAAAY down.

So in essence, I'm sending more people away from the site for less money....hmmm.

This morning revenue is also down...yikes. So much for better targeted ads generating more money. Now if we can get the both to work together it would be awesome :)

Rarely does everything run on all cylinders. Things looked improved for a day but now things look the same as they were. Targeted ads but the same old ones. Want some new advertisers!

It took Y two days to refigure my pages but the results is 90% decent targeting on about 60 subjects.

Now if the ad blocking worked 100% of the time I'd almost be happy. darn honda and toyota ads sneak in occasionally.

Nevermind...

Targeting back to crap today... That's it! I give up. No more YPN on my site.

I contacted Y about their inability to consistently block sites in block list.. they wanted me to take a screen shot of the ad showing up.. I've done that 3 times before and apparently they are incapable of querying with the 'not in' operator.

Ads not even showing on many of my pages...just white box.
1 pm Friday...