Jen has a very interesting post comparing Adsense and Yahoo’s Publisher Network ads on her Women’s Finance blog. It’s well worth a read as it reveals that both YPN and Adsense have some clear advantages over one another.
If it’s high click values that you’re after it seems that YPN is your best bet – however if it’s CTR, ePCM or ad relevancy you’ll probably lean toward Adsense. Of course it’s very early days for YPN – without a doubt they’ll be working on issues of relevancy and CTR – if they can it could be well worth the switch when they come out of beta.
Check out her full post for all the details.
In related news – I’ve noticed that in the last few days quite a few bloggers have been accepted into the YPN beta test. It looks like they’ve opened things up to a second round of testers which is a sign that it is a step closer to full release. Still no non North American testers though as far as I can see.
I’ll be curious to see how YPN’s ad service works once it goes live to the masses. I’ll be more interested to see how/if they do a better job of maintaining transparency than google does. Working with google is like working with a brick wall. With bricks that are quiet, even for bricks. They really don’t tell you much.
I agree – Google is generally difficult to communicate with. Once in a while I’ve had a response from someone who seemed genuinely interested in helping, but more often they just paste a link to their faqs and tell me nothing. I’m not a peanut Adsense client either: I’m in 5 figures yearly. Low 5 figures :-) but it still ought to be enough to get more than a yawn response, I think.
Google’s reporting is poor, also. If YPN gave me better reporting and more open communication, I’d switch even if the dollars are the same. I hope Google is listening, because I suspect a lot of us feel exactly the same way. Maybe they wouldn’t miss my revenue, but if tens of thousands of us moved, as I think we might.. well, that’s a different story.
Google needs better reporting and more openness. They need to train their support people to feel more empathy (as I said, *some* are very good) and at least pretend that they give a damn. I hope the competition makes them sit up and take notice.
Yes, interestingly, I read a report the other day on slashdot about how everyone is treating google like they used to treat Microsoft. It took them awhile, but MS learned shortly after Linux started to steal food off their plate that customer service, which they’d safely been able to ignore, being the only game in town, was what could help them maintain market share. I’m not sure they’ve embraced fully the customer service state of mind, but they are at least trying now, which is a step in the right direction. It will be interesting to see how long it takes google to learn that lesson.
I’m currently using YPN, and they don’t give you any more revenue share details than Google, and reporting is fine but nothing extraordinary.
I thought Yahoo could gain market share by just disclosing what revenue share you had, but apparently they’re going to follow Google again.
I got my acceptance for YAHOO a few days ago too. Noticed on Jason c’s blog he was distressed because he couldn’t get in on the beta…
Think they are looking for ‘regular’ bloggers, not ultra-high rankers w/huge traffic?