Yahoo! Publisher Network

19.5 Yahoo! Publisher Network

Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) (http://publisher.yahoo.com/) is probably the number one competitor to Google. In fact, they pretty much copied what AdSense had done... but didn’t do it quite as well.

On the plus-side, their ad formats are largely the same. So if you need to switch from AdSense to YPN, you should be able to keep the exact same optimization, at least as regards how the ads look (although YPN doesn’t have Ad Links or Search, so you’d lose those.)

They also have ads in RSS which could bring in some extra revenues if you’re using that on your site.

As to which ads you get served though, that’s a whole other ball game. One of the biggest problems with YPN is that the first ads they serve are often Run-Of-The-Network (RON) ads, Yahoo!’s answer to public service ads. These are just ads for companies that seem to have struck a special deal with YPN.

They pay well, when you get a click out of them, but they’re not contextualized so you don’t get many clicks. They occur much more frequently than public service ads and they’re much harder to get rid of.

And there are no CPM ads on Yahoo!, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the size of your site and your experience.

Most publishers find that they get better results with AdSense than they do with YPN... although we all keep a close eye on YPN to see if they improve enough to attract us.