Ever since YPN disabled my ad targeting I’ve been waiting for them to graciously let me know they disabled my YPN account entirely, and today it happened. For those of you running YPN and you haven’t yet received the letter, it goes something like this:
Hello Greg,
Thank you for your participation in the Yahoo! Publisher Network Beta program. As part of our efforts to ensure high-quality traffic for advertisers on the Yahoo! Publisher Network, we continuously monitor publisher attributes such as:
1. Suspicious click activity.
2. Advertiser conversion rates.
3. Overall quality of leads generated on your site.Unfortunately, due to poor traffic quality, we have terminated your Yahoo! Publisher Network account ID 7998023380 In accordance with Sections 6(a) and 6(b) of the Yahoo! Publisher Network terms and conditions, we will not include clicks from non-U.S. users or otherwise invalid clicks in your payment. We have refunded amounts generated from the non-U.S. users and otherwise invalid clicks to our advertisers and will pay any remaining amount owed to you in accord with the Terms and Conditions.
If your earnings balance is in excess of $100.00, you will receive your final payment within 90 days via the payment method you selected. Please note that we will not make payments for any earned balance less than $100.00. The final payment will be adjusted to exclude any amounts generated in violation of the Yahoo! Publisher Network Terms and Conditions and Program Policies. For example, if we determine that all traffic is non-compliant, you will not receive a payment.
Please do not hesitate to contact us if we can be of any further assistance.
Sincerely,
Mary Fajardo
Content Analyst
Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! gives you the option to target specific ad categories to your site using the aptly named ad targeting option. They do this, obviously, because they understand that you know your visitors better than they do and you can target the type of ads your visitors will respond to. Yahoo! has always acknowledged that an algorithm can’t always provide the most relevant results, so this feature makes sense for them. Wouldn’t you know, using their ad targeting feature I was able to increase my CTR and CPM to well above what they were providing without using ad targeting. Unfortunately many months later the feature was disabled because much of my traffic came from myspace and according to Yahoo! myspace traffic is “poor quality traffic”. I wonder why Google doesn’t think so…
Anyway, once my ad targeting was disabled the ads became less relevant to my users interests as well as the sites content, my CTR and CPM plummeted and my earnings sank to a fraction of what they were before. Apparently I knew my visitors better than Yahoo!, go figure. I wasn’t surprised or upset when my account was finally terminated for poor conversion after that as I saw it coming months in advance. How is it I am to blame for Yahoo!’s poor decisions?
If anybody at Yahoo! is reading this, I would just like to say I don’t appreciate being blamed for your inability to provide contextually relevant ads to my visitors. My 100% qualified US visitors. Either beef up your ad serving technology or reach out to more advertisers to bulk up your ad inventory, but don’t blame your publishers for your shortcomings. It’s insulting. If you can’t get your act together, focus your attention on something you’re good at. You’re already spreading yourself too thin as it is, there’s no point in continuing to ad insult to injury.
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