Yahoo! Publisher Network: Ad Targeting Disabled?

Posted in Internet

Oh, I’ve heard the horror stories. Yahoo!’s been kicking out innocent publishers from their poorly organized BETA program for a long time now. For some, Yahoo! accuses the webmasters of click fraud, for others, vague terms such as “lack of conversion”. They never lay out exact reasons or rationale behind their banning; they simply use and abuse their publishers when they feel necessary. Disagree with Yahoo!? Too bad! They obviously don’t care if you care about their relationship with you…

Let me first give you some background on my relationship with Yahoo!. I’ve been a Yahoo! Publisher Network member for almost two solid years now. I am what you would call one of their relatively bigger partners: I’ve been cranking out mid-$XX,XXX annually since the program’s beginning. I was originally invited to the program when I went to the Ad:Tech conference, hosted in New York in 2005, and met up with/became friends with a few representatives from Yahoo!. They wrote my name and information down, and a month or two later, I was invited in one of the first few rounds of publisher invites they sent out.

Anyways, this brings me to the bad news. Recently, I’ve had my ad targeting disabled in the Yahoo! Publisher Network account manager. This is a sad move on Yahoo!’s part, as I have always been a hard-line YPN fanatic when it comes to the never ending Google Adsense vs. YPN debate. For most of my higher traffic sites, I’ve previously switched out Adsense ads in favor of YPN ads, and have produced solid click-through rates and eCPMs ever since my induction into the program in late 2005.

Anyways, Yahoo! claims my “conversion is not meeting with industry standards”, and therefore, they believe removing my ad targeting capabilities will resolve the problem. Rather than taking it on themselves that their horrendous contextual ad targeting FAILS at delivering even 1/4 of what Google has to offer, they take the liberty to blame it all on me, when I am clearly not the one at fault. I have never abused the ad targeting mechanism, never targeted insurance ads on a gaming website, never tried to pry more money than I deserve out of their publisher network.

I immediately, of course, emailed the Yahoo! representative that informed me of this non-sense. Ever since ad targeting has been disabled, my click-through rate has remained the same, yet my RPC has plummeted over 80%. Goes to show that I wasn’t abusing the system at all, because my users are equally interested in the stuff that I targeted towards them, as they are the junk that Yahoo! now shows them. After the click-through, it’s not my fault at all if there is no conversion. They can’t possibly run a legit CPC program if they are going to impact publisher’s earnings based on after-click conversion. Then it’s not a CPC program anymore. It’s CPA, and they’re false advertising it as CPC so as to attract a larger market. Go figure.

The Yahoo! representative replied back and failed to even attempt to make a deal to re-instate my targeting powers. She even took the time to let me know that “[they] are doing [me] a favor by disabling [my] Ad Targeting, as [they] only provide this option for [their] long-time partners. Most YPN abusers are banned on the spot, no questions asked.” Thank you ma’am, but I pay for your salary. Stop treating me like a piece of cow dung and realize that this is supposed to be a symbiotic relationship. 50/50. Not Yahoo! > Robert Afnani. Anyways, she didn’t really get that so I gave up. My other two friends at Yahoo! have long since ‘moved on’ in careers, so I really don’t have any top-secret connection anymore to keep me going strong (at least till next Ad:Tech, heh).

The Yahoo! Publisher Network program has really slipped since it began. Gone are the days when RPCs skyrocketed past $1.00 a click. Gone are the days of friendly publisher/customer/client support, when a live Yahoo! representative would help publishers improve their sites to make more money. Gone are the days that Yahoo! cared to build a strong bond between YPN and its respective publishers.

Yahoo! really is a falling knife. I’m going to revert most of my contextual advertising space to Google now.