Last night I have decided to start implementing my YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) ads on my blog. I applied when they have first came been released to the public and I was denied because of traffic regulations. I then applied a while ago and I have been approved, but the email has been sitting in my inbox for quite sometime that I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

For some reason readers or users who want to apply for YPN do not get approved a lot, I am assuming yahoo wants X amount of traffic before they a approve your site. It is almost going through a screening process before you can start to publish their ads on your website or blog.

What is Yahoo Publisher Network

YPN is just like Google Adsense, displaying relevant ads within your blog posts or website. Listed below are some features and benefits direct from Yahoo:

Benefits:

• Increase your revenue by monetizing the content of your web site.
• Satisfy your users by offering them ad content related to their interests.
• Leverage our knowledge of how best to optimize your contextual advertising.
• Get paid quickly via a convenient PayPal payment option and earn a return on the money in your PayPal account by depositing your funds in PayPal’s Money Market Reserve Fund.

Features:

• Advanced ad targeting and display capabilities can improve the relevance of your results.
• Ability to filter competitive listings from appearing on your site—to protect your business.
• Access to a wide range of tools, services and programs that enable you—and your users—to get the most value from your site.
• Four ways to collect your revenue, including a PayPal option that lets you get paid more quickly.

Watch the YPN Tour Here.

I will be testing different places on my blog for the use of YPN. I had great success with Adsense on my old layout with the box on the right side of the content, so that is where YPN shall be placed. Reading other blogs about YPN some state positive facts about them MoreMerchant says:

There is another bright side for YPN. While they currently pay 40% more per click on average when compared to Google Adsense this is the low point in the year for their payouts. As recent as 2 weeks ago they were paying 40% more than they were paying now. So that 70 cent click was paying closer to $1. That is right! Yahoo was paying $1 per click when Google pays 50 cents.

Angsuman overall experience:

In summary Yahoo Publisher Network provides more versatile services while AdSense as of now has better ad targeting.

So after reading some good positive feedback on YPN I decided to finally install this code on my blog. The process was very simple and the code selection was kinda of poor, because it did not let me chose my link colors background etc. It has this box where you chose only borders, I simply just went in the code to match the link color to my site, that is all I wanted.

Upon Installation:

Upon installation, I formatted the ad to show on the right side of my content. Like I have stated I found this to be a good area for higher CTRs. But when I installed and check my template to make sure it was in its proper place I found the ads were not relevant at all.

Usually Adsense picks up the context and shows relevant ads right away. You can view the image below. It only shows 2 ads and they are not even relevant, they may be defaults.

So I gave it 10 minutes, I mean their engine should be able to read the context fast enough to show relevant ads for each post. Finally it showed relevant ads on that single post. When I view another page I received the default links. Hmmm…

I wonder if YPN spiders each page individually first instead of reading the context? Not too sure how it all works but I was assuming it is very similar to Adsense. This happens to new posts as well. Ads are not showing any relevance to the post. It takes about 5 to 10 minutes before relevance ads start to show.

One aspect I do not like about YPN is they have that “Ads by Yahoo” at the top corner of their ads. I wished it was at the bottom as so the ad does not stick out as an ad! For the most part, I will give YPN a go and see where I am with it and see if it will be of good use or even a Adsense replacement.