YPN Not Ready for Prime Time

After having the Yahoo Publisher Network ads up for a couple days, I decided without a second thought to pull the plug and replace them with the tried and true Google AdSense. The main problem I saw was that ads were very poorly targeted. On a page where Google would produce extremely relevant ads on blogging, PHP, and MySQL, Yahoo would produce ads on Vonage and Road Runner Internet service. Not only were they irrelevant, but the same ads appeared on every page regardless of content.

Consequently, AdSense has a much higher click through rate than YPN. I expect that YPN ad relevancy will begin to improve as more advertisers jump on the Yahoo bandwagon. With that said, YPN does appear to pay more per click, but the sheer number of clicks I was losing using Yahoo couldn’t justify the increase.

Yahoo is definitely showing some innovation in the ad serving space by introducing RSS feed monetization. Where is Google on this one? RSS is a potential gold-mine for advertisers who now have the ability to beam their products directly into the news readers of hundreds of thousands of content-hungry consumers. I expect Google to make a play for the RSS ad space sometime early next year.