Monday, April 09, 2007

YPN aka Yahoo! Publisher Network Protects Itself

A few weeks ago I remember my intern talking about how great the DigitalPoint forums were and that he had just sold two joost tokens for $10 each. After giving him a hard time about selling his Joost invites he switched topics and started rambling on an on about how much he can't stand Google AdSense and that users in the DP forums were saying that the Yahoo Publisher Network paid much higher amounts compared to AdSense. I went on to explain why it is that YPN will probably always pay better than Google and I'll give you the same explanation.

First off, Yahoo was smart in it's method for rolling out YPN. Instead of opening it up to a huge number of users for the beta they did an invite-only launch. Making a program invite only almost always increases the demand of the product and exclusivity strengthens its brand. Additionally, the invites were only sent out to sites of high quality and unique content (this goes back to the fundamental business model of search engines).

Then once the ad network was gaining momentum and getting more and more advertisers to use the publisher network instead of just the normal sponsored search results / ppc ads they did a bit of advertising to invite others with high quality sites to apply. But they still only allowed those with sites in the top of the bell curve into the network.

Additionally YPN is staying commited (for the time being) to sites that are only in English and that target a U.S. user base. Doing so allows them to get a solid group of high quality sites that aren't prone to click fraud or MFA's "Made For AdSense" web sites. Even with pressure from all sides trying to push them to go international, Yahoo Publisher Network is saying NO! And I think it's a fundamentally brilliant move.

Yahoo is benefiting from Google for once in this area. Google launched AdSense and opened it up to the entire world (I exaggerate a bit) within the first month. The spammers got a wiff of all that free cash and immediately the network was hosed. Then Google had to play damage control, and has been doing so for the past year and a half now, and as a result they don't pay their as well as YPN. And in the end that's what its all about. Publishers want an easy way to make money and advertisers want to make a return on their ad dollars, by keeping the YPN publishers happy, Yahoo! has kept their advertisers happy as well. They don't have to send out nasty letters very often either ;)

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 09:37 AM
Permanent Link: YPN aka Yahoo! Publisher Network Protects Itself | Comments (0)

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