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.