Yahoo's Official YPN FAQ
Who pays more, Yahoo or Google?
Yahoo pays WAY more per click, but the CTR is in the dumps. Over all many people make more from Yahoo.
Here's my experience with YPN vs. Adsense. I have tested it on 40+ sites across a pretty wide range of sectors.
Adsense is far more advanced in detecting what your page is about. The ads, in general are more relevant and you'll likely have a higher CTR than Yahoo.
While you can run more than one ad set per page with yahoo, the ads repeat, which also contributes to the lower CTR.
Yahoo has a much smaller advertising base than Google. In many categories, they simply don't have relevant ads and if so, your CTR can be almost nothing.
Yahoo pays more per click than google generally- sometimes a LOT more. You also have to remember you clicks are likely going to be less, so you have to factor that in.
Yahoo also uses "stop" words, or is so bad at detecting what your site is about that it simply won't display relevant ads on certain pages even when an entire site is about a single theme. I think YPN relies a lot on the page title to determine what your site is about, and they can be easily fooled if a word has a dual meaning- and thus display ads that have nothing to do with your theme. Yahoo has "ad targeting" where you can suggest what ads you want, but it is only a suggestion and doesn't mean yahoo will serve ads about the category you tell it to. As most of my sites are hard coded html, I can run adsense on the pages that yahoo doesn't server relevant ads on. It would be very hard to do that with dynamic pages unless someone was able to write a program that could tell it what pages were to display adsense and which received YPN.
The bottom line: It works fantastic on some pages, horrible on others. I would not convert 100% of my sites to YPN unless they improve ad relevance.
The pay per click can greatly exceed adsense if you happen to be lucky to have sites where they have good ad coverage. One site of mine pays well over $10 per click and adsense never came close to that.
How can Yahoo pay as much as 30 times what adsense does in some cases? (it certainly doesn't average that).
#1 Adsense has smart pricing and serves regional ads (which can pay a lot if your visitor happens to have the right IP). As far as I know, Yahoo isn't that advanced and will display the high paying regional ads to all visitors.... i.e. someone from California is going to be served an ad that targets someone in New York. While a person from out-of-the-area is less likely to click the high paying ad, some do.
#2 I think yahoo is paying almost 100% of the ad revenue out while it is in beta. If they were paying the same as adsense, why would anyone switch? YPN would get applications from everyone who was kicked out of adsense - so right now I think it is a loss leader to get people to convert. Yahoo also seems to be in an aggressive mode to get advertisers as I have been contacted a few times with offers of free advertiser dollars to try their program. Yahoo payouts are likely to decrease once they feel they have enough people converted. I think the payouts will be much closer to what adsense is paying. The increased competition is likely to benefit website publishers as google will probably be forced to share a higher percentage of the ad revenue. When MSN gets rolling with their program, it can only help.
I know several people who have gone back to 100% adsense because YPN just didn't work for them. I will stick with a combination of both for now because it has increased my overall earnings.
My other complaint about YPN is that their reporting is a day delayed. You get an estimated total of what all your sites have made, but individual channel or domain results are not available until the next day. They also update their estimated earnings a lot less frequently during the day vs. adsense.
The first thing YPN needs to address is serving different ads when you run more than one set of ads on a page, and of course they need to have a lot relevant ads to serve, and improve what detection on what your page is about.
I think YPN has done a pretty good job for a beta program, and they respond very quickly to any suggestion you have about improving their program. While they are quick to respond, I have yet to see them make any significant changes. Other than the payouts, they still have a ways to go before their algorithm matches adsense. Even if someone doesn't decide to go with YPN, I think the extra competition is going to mean better payouts across the board.
