Battle of the mash ups, Adsense versus Yahoo

I asked to join Yahoos publisher network and I got an invite from Yahoo to join their beta publisher network this week. This is the Yahoo equivalent of Google adsense. I've been using adsense for a year now and have finally figured out how to lose less money per month than I was doing before :)

So, competition is a good thing right? Consumer wins. I'm not so sure. I phoned Yahoo this morning asking whats in it for me to move to them? I can't find a single thing. They wouldn't say that they paid out more than google did so monetary wise, there seems to be no claimed advantage.

I could use both networks for ads but can't mix them on a single page which is a pain.

This web mashup thing is awesome as a way to integrate services like advertising but without transparency and metrics on the services then I can't see a reason for switching between any of them. They are competing but they aren't because they don't price against each other. This has to be the only market where there is no price competition! If one of them could guarantee a higher payout then that would be something but then who knows what googles payout is? Noone. How would you even know? So, the consumer, i.e. the site publisher has no way to compare competing services.

I guess the secret is to sell space for ads to people directly, this, for me (on Trackpedia) has been a lot more profitable than selling space to google. But, as far as choosing a publisher network, I see no reason or competitive advantage for one network versus another.

Comments

[Chris Salmon]

We use both Adsense and YPN as part of monetizing traffic to our network of resort sites ( http://www.resortnetwork.net ) - and they both are on the same pages. Is there something I'm missing? Why did you say you can't use them both on the same page?

But I have to say, that given the same placement and screen space, Adsense brings in MUCH more revenue overall. YPN more per click, that's often true. But the YPN ads are just not relevant to our content SO much of the time, that they get fewer clicks. A LOT fewer clicks.

Even when you try to use Yahoo's targeting tool, it doesn't work. It's like the Yahoo engine is not even reading my pages, just putting up whatever slop is handy in their ad inventory. I'm sure this is the main part of their problem and whey their stock is less than $30 and Google is over $500.

I'm a fan of Yahoo, I go back far enough in the business to remember when it's address was yahoo.akebono.stanford.edu (that's from memory - correct me if I'm wrong!) and it was a simple text list of links to various internet resources.

But they've got to get this context problem fixed. I hope (for them) that their new update fixes this problem.

On the other hand I've often wondered if maybe, they just don't have the ad inventory that Google has and maybe they simply don't have relevant ads to show sometimes! Still that seems unlikely given their size, but maybe ..

At any rate glad I found your article, thanks!

Chris Salmon, VP
Cyberstation, Inc.

[Billy]

I called YPN support and they told me that you can't have google and ypn ads on the same page.

[Tom]

You're lucky to have the option! YPN hasn't been rolled out worldwide yet, so we don't have it in the UK. Judging Google's attitude to some of their publishers and advertisers, and their ever increasing grip on the contextual advertising market, I think th competition can only be a good thing. My advice - stick to Google for the short term until the YPN bugs are fixed and their pay out rate is known.

[Daniel]

Hi,
i am developing a mobile site (php xhtml) and am figuring out how to incorporate adsense or ypn to show and work on mobile browsers.
Is there any answer to this?

Daniel

[jeff paul]

well i think google ads are much better then the yahoo one's , becuase it pay's much better then them and the ads are more apealling.

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