It’s 2008 and Yahoo still stinks. Is anyone surprised?

While setting up a campaign in AdBrite, and looking at the publisher interface, I realized that AdBrite has their shit together. AdBrite may not be the biggest ad network, but they have almost everything they need to compete against Google, something that Yahoo definitely does not have. AdBrite does a good job of copying Google’s features and making them their own, something that Yahoo can’t even get right. I’d even go as far as saying that AdBrite’s keyword targeting is probably better than YPN’s. And AdBrite offers way more ad formats than YPN could ever hope to offer! AdBrite features text, image and video ads, in multiple formats, like contextual “in-text” ads, made famous by Intellitxt and Kontera. Hell, AdBrite can even monetize the images on your site with BritePic.

Yahoo should seriously consider buying AdBrite for their code/intellectual property and just integrate everything into Panama and YPN. Yahoo would bring the traffic and AdBrite would bring the relevant ads in multiple formats.

What’s happened to YPN lately? Daily earnings were up a considerable amount for us towards the end of November/the beginning of December, with some nice rates per click, and now they’re taking a big hit on our YPN account. Did Yahoo try to change something with the targetting? Anyone else seeing the same trend?

Also, we thought it was worth mentioning that Shoemoney has been having a hell of a time with the Yahoo Search Marketing department lately as they’ve canceled his YSM affiliate account over at CJ. His post illustrates just how incompetent Yahoo seems to be these days. It cracked us up that his post is titled “Yahoo Search Marketing - ‘We Know We Suck’”.

What the hell is Yahoo thinking?!!

Now’s the time to tell Yahoo what you think about YPN and to give them some much needed constructive crisitism. Earlier this week the YPN Blog had a post with a link to an online survey for YPN publishers. The survey only took about 5 minutes to complete and had some text fields for the more important questions where your able to give detailed feedback to Yahoo. Hopefully Yahoo will take the feedback from these surveys seriously and put something into action with YPN soon.

Here’s a link to the survey. Feel free to fill it out.

Just over a year ago people, typically those who were banned from AdSense, were willing to pay up to $1000 for an invite to YPN on various forums. Since then, things haven’t been so hot for YPN. People realized their CTR’s and ad targeting sucked and that Yahoo is one of the slowest moving companies on the internet these days. YPN has seen little improvement over the past two years since its launch and we finally reached our boiling point and decided to write this post. Below are all our major gripes with YPN after having used it for over a year and a half and being fed-up with our attempts to earn more money with YPN.

• YPN’s ad targeting is shit! Category targeting doesn’t work very well either. The poor targeting kills your CTR and overall pay day. If Yahoo fixed this they would instantly make more money from their ad content network and actually be an AdSense competitor! So why is it taking so long?! We gave up on any hopes of this improving months and months ago.

• The ad inventory is there, it just isn’t living up to its full potential. Lower your minimum bid in Panama to $0.01 or $0.05 per click and people won’t think twice about testing their ads on Yahoo.

• Start paying for international visitors clicks damn it! What happens when an international visitors clicks one of your ads? We don’t know, but Yahoo’s PROBABLY charging someone for that click and they’re not sharing any of that revenue with publishers. YPN doesn’t compensate publishers for international users click-throughs. Zero. Zilch. So don’t expect to be making any money off your ad impressions to international visitors. Why the hell would Yahoo limit publishers clicks to US visitors for over two years now!? It’s insane how much money publishers are missing out on because of this.

• Open up YPN to international publishers. People outside of the US want in too. No progress on this in the past two years either.

• Run more than just text ads on your network. Image ads, video ads and link units would all be welcomed additions to YPN. Some people say AdSense link units are their top earners, so why isn’t Yahoo doing anything to bring them to their network?

• Despite all its problems YPN was still attractive to publishers because of the high price per click that everyone was talking about getting at first. Over the past two years though, people have been talking about how they’re getting less and less per click now. We’ve seen this in our accounts as well. An example would be a site that used to generate $0.80 per click is now down to as little as $0.07 per click. Paying out a higher percentage per click again would potentially woo over more AdSense publishers.

• DO NOT LET YOUR AD NETWORK GO DOWN FOR 48 HOURS. It’s as simple as that. WTF Yahoo!?

• Stop making it so hard for publishers to get accounts!! We want to make you money! Your turnaround time for account approvals shouldn’t be measured in months.

• The official YPN blog sucks. It’s filed with the same duplicate content from the Yahoo Search Marketing blog. If it weren’t for your duplicate content and crappy weekly stories it’d probably never get updated. It hardly ever has any actual news about YPN, but that doesn’t really surprise us since nothing ever happens with YPN these days. But still. The blog sucks.

• No report delivery via email. Offer customized reports with email delivery. AdSense has it.

• AdSense has these pretty little round corners for their ad units now. They look great on “web 2.0ish” sites. Help us out here Yahoo!

• One of YPN’s best features, in our opinion, is the fact that they don’t limit you to 3 ads per page like Google does with AdSense. We don’t like running more than 2 ads per page with AdSense, to help avoid any low paying ads, but we’re sure there are tons of people who want to run more than 3 ads per page for legitimate reasons. Look at blogs like Engadget who have 10 AdSense ad units on a page. They can only do that because they’re special. YPN lets everyone do that. Yahoo should capitalize on that. Pimp that out to your publishers. But stop showing the same (non-targeted) ad in multiple ad units on the page.

What do you readers think? What are some reasons that you guys think YPN sucks? We’d love to hear them.

There’s no way for us to really know why YPN is still in private beta 2 years after its initial launch. You would think that after 2 years YPN would have made at least some progress out of private beta and be a few steps closer to the public launch. However, that’s still not the case. Our guess is that YPN’s 2 year beta status could be due to Yahoo’s lack of attention to the service. Does Yahoo not get how important and profitable their content network is, or should I say, could potentially be? Yahoo has had their head up their ass focused on Panama for the past year and seems to have almost completely abandoned their YPN service, and its publishers, by only offering minimal updates to the service’s features here and there over the past 2 years.

Is Yahoo embarrassed by YPN thus far? Are they planning a major overhaul like they did with Panama? Because that would be a huge waste of time in our opinion. Do people even work for YPN anymore? We really started to wonder when YPN went down for almost 48 hours this summer, leaving publishers in the dark. Since YPN is still in beta, it gives Yahoo an excuse when things go wrong and publishers start to lose money. Blame it on the beta.

Since we all know YPN’s biggest weakness is its terrible ad targeting, and Yahoo can’t seem to come up with an automated tool or some kind of algorithm to get it right, why don’t they build a tool for publishers to try to increase the relevancy on their own. Here are a few ideas:

• Expand your category list. Add more categories, subcategories and niches. This would probably be the easiest way.

• Create a spiding tool and create a list of keywords from a site/page and then let the publishers select x amount of keywords that best fit that page or site. The downside is that this is sort of an honor system which we know doesn’t necessarily work very well on the internet.

• Allow publishers to specify keywords to give Yahoo a hint of what should be showing up on the page.

• Drop the minimum bid in Panama to 1 cent or 5 cents. This would bring more advertisers. More advertisers means more ads to distribute across the content network. More ads means more keywords. More keywords SHOULD mean that Yahoo has the ad inventory to best suit your sites content. Some people may think that dropping the minimum bid to 5 cents or even lower would be bad and substantially decrease the amount YPN pays out per click. This may be true but it could in turn help your CTR and eCPM, which would mean more money in the long run. There have been more than a few times that I’ve decided not to test campaigns on Yahoo because of Panama’s 10 cent minimum bid. So I gave my money to Google and Microsoft instead.

Are we the only ones who like reports via email? Logging in to check stats everyday can get a little tedious. It’s not the biggest deal EVER but sometimes its the little things that count. AdSense has had the ability to setup custom reports and custom report delivery options for years now, but there’s no way to get reports via email with YPN. And there probably won’t be for a long time if Yahoo keeps up its current track record.

Maybe if enough people being to request features we’ll see something come out of Yahoo again.

This is something that came to mind and became very apparent when I was thinking about what to write for this site. Simply stated:

Google innovates in the online advertising industry. Yahoo doesn’t. Yahoo doesn’t even do a good job of copying Google’s ideas.

Hello and welcome to YPNstinks.com. Get ready for some rants on why we believe YPN stinks.