YPN Progress Report
YPN could be the ultimate contextual advertising program but they lack one basic function:
relevant ads
We have a small handful of sites that could run YPN ads on… but should we? The few sites that we identified are not geo-specific sites. They are sites which fit better with the type of ads YPN is currently serving up. For example if you have a health site that is not very specific to the type of health issue or products then YPN would be good for it.
It has been about a month since we started with YPN and we now have pulled the ads off of one of the two testing sites. There are a few reasons why we pulled the ads… the important thing to know is it was purely a business decision.
When we first started out our average click was around $2.50. I’m not 100% sure why but it has dropped to just about a $1.00 per click now. I could speculate why but it really doesn’t matter… the bottom line is I’m getting much less now.
The biggest reason is the click through rate. The two sites we tested out YPN on the click through rate was considerably (4%-14%) low but at first this didn’t matter as the overall revenue was more. The last two weeks this hasn’t been the case since the average cost per click is lower now we started loosing money. We get considerably higher click through rate from Google Adsense since the ads are very targeted to what the visitors are looking for.
Since we pulled our YPN ads off of one of the sites we are experiencing an average of 24% increase of revenue. Once Yahoo gets a better handle on targeting ads I think YPN would be a better choice but until that time we will run YPN on a limited basis.