AdMoolah News and Views

Many people are asking whether they should switch to YPN from AdSense or stick to AdSense. My answer: use both.

I plan to slowly introduce YPN to all of my AdSense sites, and display both AdSense and YPN 50-50 on every site. Once I figure out which one does best on each particular site, I will drop the loser to show only 10% of the time. I will keep it at 10% so I can keep my eye on how things are performing. If the one at 10% seems to take off, I can increase it back to 50% or 90%.

I guess I need to automate some of this. Some spreadsheet work is in order, I guess.

The YPN beta has gone fairly well so far. I’ve only had the ads on one site for 48 hours, so I do not have enough data to determine whether or not the revenues are better than AdSense, so for now I’ll just give you some of my initial impressions on using the system.

• Setting up YPN ad layouts is similar to setting up AdSense ad layouts. They provide a screen where you select the format and colors, and there is a text box where the JavaScript that is needed for you site is displayed. They have channels but call them “Tracking Categories”. Customized color palettes can also be set up.
• Statistics are not updated nearly as frequently as AdSense statistics are. This could be an issue for those of us who obsessively check statistics. The only statistic which is near “real time” is Daily Balance, which seems to be updated every few hours. Statistics for Impressions, CTR, and eCPM are only available the next day. One nice touch for the daily balance is they tell you the time that it was last updated, for example they will say “Daily Balance $XX.XX, * Estimated as of Sep 12, 2005 at 10:00 AM PST”.
• Support seems very responsive. I emailed two questions on Saturday night and received one response Sunday morning and the other on Monday morning. They also have telephone support available, which I have not tried yet.

After reading YPN’s Terms and Conditions, It seemed like they did not allow publishers to reveal their monthly revenue amount. To be sure I emailed support and they responded by letting me know that revenue amount cannot be shared at this point.

So, for now, AdMoolah will be for sharing AdSense revenue only. Hopefully when YPN goes out of beta they will amend the Terms and Conditions to allow revenue to be made public, and I can ad YPN revenue sharing to the database.

I was recently approved for the YPN Beta. Right now it seems like you can only have one web site displaying YPN ads, so I will not be displaying them on AdMoolah. I’m very interested to see how YPN compares to AdSense. I plan to randomly display Google and AdSense ads and see which results in more earnings. I will let you know the results of my testing of the new program.

Update: I found out that I can display YPN ads on more than one site. Just like AdSense, now that I am approved, I can simply put ads on any site.

JenSense is reporting her results of using YPN for almost a month by comparing them to her previous month’s AdSense revenue. Her results seem to be that the total earnings are very similar.

I am slightly disappointed because we saw some early results from WorkBoxer that indicated that YPN might be outperforming AdSense. I’ll have to keep my eyes peeled for more comparisons.

Workboxers is reporting that the new Yahoo Publisher Network is outperforming Google’s AdSense by a large margin. This is just a small sample but the result is promising!

Lets hope this starts up a war between Google and Yahoo that gives the publishers a larger percentage of the CPC!

JenSense has more details on the workings of the Yahoo Publisher Network. She has lots of screenshots to show.

It looks like anyone who is comfortable with AdSense will have no problems switching over to YPN. Now they just need to approve my application.

It appears that YPN has now gone beta. I applied for the beta, but I was hoping it would be fully launched today so I could start experimenting right away.

To apply for the beta you can go here. Participants of the program must be a resident of the U.S., with valid U.S. Social Security number or Tax ID.

More details about the beta program can be found at Jensense.

In a NY Times article published today, is going to launch it’s AdSense competitor tomorrow (Wednesday). This has been talked about for a while now, but it looks like its finally going to happen.

I think this is good news for the whole PPC industry. Competition is always good, and we should Yahoo and Google push each other to bring out better features, and (I hardly even dare to day it) maybe even better revenue shares for publishers.

I know I’ll be signing up as soon as I can to try it out. I may need to update the site to allow entries for both AdSense and Yahoo publisher network.

Now we just need Microsoft to join in on this too.

I can’t wait.

Found via John Battelle’s SearchBlog.