In other contextual advertising news – I was speaking with someone close to the YPN team this week and was a little saddened to hear that it’s unlikely that they’ll allowing non US publishers to enter the beta test for some time yet.
This confirmed my suspicions after seeing them kick out some of their beta testers in the last week due to them having too much non US traffic. If they’d been close to going international I suspect they’d have allowed such publishers to remain.
The challenges of non US traffic are obviously a challenge for YPN – I suspect the logistics behind sourcing a large amount of relevant ads that can be targeted geographically are beyond what most of us can imagine.
So when will YPN realise that there are people outside of the US that use the internet? lol
Pretty sure they realise but are doing it because their infrastructure to this point is only so big. Rather than launching a global product they are working in a defined area with publishers who they can pay on time and simply and with advertisers from the same area.
Frustrating as it is for us non US bods – I can kind of see why they are doing it this way.
To me YPN’s entire overseas publisher exclusion and non geo targeted ad serving are both just ridiculously strange. When Yahoo! bought Overture one of the big things was that they plugged into an existing advertiser base and existing sales force both which has a world wide reach. Overture have offices in 20 countries so I can’t imagine sourceing advertisers is the issue to why they’re not rolling this out beyond the US of A.
The strange thing is that many people outside of the US have their sites hosted in the US and most of their traffic comes from the US. It is just that the site owner is outside of america.
I hope MSN doesn’t make the same mistake.
Of course they could have launched globally and faced the challenge of click fraud, banking and all the other additional problems that would have occurred. Then after they made that major mistake they could have spent the next 3 years trying to repair their image after all the bad word of mouth they would have received by doing so (i.e. Chitika and their “curiosity click” fiasco that saw some publishers having their earnings reduced 90% in some cases, late payments, delays, etc etc…)
Give Yahoo a break. The good thing for overseas publishers is that when it gets to you it’ll be all working great after they used us guinea pigs in the US as test subjects, injecting us with their filthy vaccines to make sure they worked before giving it away to everyone else for free. (Hey, sounds just like our Pharmaceutical companies!)