It Pays the Bills
Yahoo!’s resident toublemaker weighs in on the past and present of contextual advertising
When people can’t think of anything particularly good to say about their job, I often hear “well, it pays the bills…”, which often elicits a response of “yup” and a knowing nod.
In all the excitement surrounding self-serve contextual advertising in the last few years, people often overlook one of the more important byproducts: the fact that it pays the bills.
Now I don’t mean to suggest that millions of people are making a living off this stuff, but a lot of people are 
recovering the costs associated with hosting and updating a personal or semi-professional website.
Thinking back six or eight years, I remember how difficult it was to get a personal website online. First, you had to register a domain name. That used to cost easily ten times what it does today and it was far less user-friendly. Next you needed a hosting provider. They also cost a lot more and delivered far less. Then you had to track down and assemble all the publishing tools and utilities: graphics editing, FTP client (upload forms were far less common), log analysis (hard to use), HTML authoring, and so on.
Then, as many of us discovered, keeping it up to date was a daunting task that often involved multiple tools, lots of tweaking, and nearly infinite patience. Content management systems were big, expensive things that mere individuals didn’t toy with.
All that work just to watch the hit counter go up a few digits per week. “Show me the money?” There wasn’t any!
As with so much in the high-tech world, time–and the demands of publishers–has solved many of our problems. Back then, early-adopter publishers like us knew that the tools would get easier to use, cheaper and faster. Connectivity would improve, more people would come online, and so on. And what do you know? We were right! We now have great graphics tools, free or low-cost software programs, web-based content management services and dozens of low-cost hosting providers to choose from.
But rarely did anyone suggest that our sites could ultimately pay for themselves (without resorting to e-commerce or auctions). Maybe that’s why this self-publishing revolution is still downplayed, even ignored, in the media—the fact that few of its members, if any, foresaw it.
That’s fine: Being under the radar has served to fuel the revolution in some pretty amazing ways — amazing enough “pays the bills” for thousands of publishers, anyway.
Jeremy Zawodny
Yahoo! Search
J.Z. spoke this morning at Webmaster World.
| Post Comment | categories:: Guest Columns
April 19th, 2006 at 5:33 am
I don’t know, Jeremy. I respect you. I respect Yahoo. I think 95% of all of Yahoo’s product offerings are better than Google’s but I haven’t seen how YPN really shines. Granted I haven’t run it as thoroughly as Adsense but the few times I have put YPN up and left it up for a week, 2 weeks I have noticed really poor conversion rates and really poor ads based on context. It may be that YPN takes longer than usual to “settle in” but for people trying to earn an income, the cost to convert is significant in terms of lost income.
Maybe if YPN can figure out what the Adsense killer is to make guys like me say that sacrificing some Adsense money over time is worth it to reap YPN benefits, then I’ll really do a switch - but for now I’ll just read the YPN blog and listen to you guys tell us why you’re better.
April 19th, 2006 at 6:07 am
I don’t think J.Z. was pimping Yahoo! in particualar here, just commenting on how things have changed for the better for publishers in the last few years!
April 19th, 2006 at 7:29 am
For me ad revenue is not only paying for hosting, but also college! Which is very nice. (Thanks YPN)
April 19th, 2006 at 7:30 am
Ad revenue is not only paying for hosting, but also for my college! Which is very cool. (Thanks YPN!)
April 19th, 2006 at 7:55 am
No sweat, tyatay.
April 19th, 2006 at 10:32 am
in response to Aaron Brazell:
I agree that Yahoo advertisements are not as great as adsense. Here is my theory:
With Google Adwords, users can get started for $5 and dont have to have their website reviewed by Google in order to start promoting it. I signed up for adwords and had users hitting my site through adsense ads in a matter of minutes.
Yahoo, on the other hand, requires that you pay $50 and wait to have your website reviewed by overture before being accepted as an advertiser.
This means that there are many times fewer advertisers on yahoo fighting for ad placement.
If Yahoo were to make the process for becoming an advertiser easier & cheaper, and promote it more, they would have more advertisers and therefore more competition and therefore more revenue for the publishers.
just my .02
April 19th, 2006 at 11:42 am
The all-powerful administrator is right. This isn’t about YPN specifically. In fact, I’ve been using AdSense for a while now and have tested YPN a few times too. I’ve also experimented with other forms of monetization (affiliate, links, etc).
But the overall point still holds: contextual advertising seems to be the one that the largest pool of people benefit from.
April 19th, 2006 at 1:12 pm
I don’t know what the next ad revenue is that will be as effective as Contextual ads has been. But I just hope that contextual ads revolve as ad blindness comes into play as more people become aware that it is an ad they are clicking on.
As for YPN vs. Adsense. I have been with Adsense for over two years and have missed the boat when people reported a higher revenues per click. However, YPN has been great for me and have only been with them for just about 3 months. I owned a total of 14 sites. For three months, I have earned 3x what Adsense pays on only 3 sites that was recently converted to YPN. The other sites will be converted soon as I plan to acclimate them slowly.
Thanks YPN for having a great alternative to Adsense!
April 19th, 2006 at 5:09 pm
YPN has bought me a laptop which I haven’t owned one before
and I hope they will buy me a new car soon. lol
Keep up the great work, YPN.
Tranix
April 20th, 2006 at 3:56 am
lol@Administrator commenting. I do that ALL the time!
Yep, I’m aware that JZ was not “pimping” YPN. I sorta escaped the confines of the entry. Mt apologies. It was sort of what I had on my brain when I saw “YPN Blog”, “Jeremy Zawodny”.
April 24th, 2006 at 6:48 am
This article is not what I expected in this blog. It reads like an example of what you want us to think is the norm. An effort in conditioning us to believe that the few pennies we get should be appreciated. For a brand new hobbymaster, that may be true. But as a full time publisher who cares about content and presentation, pays to drive traffic, and targets a shopping demographic, it’s an not encouraging. It seems to say this is how it is, so be happy with it.
April 24th, 2006 at 9:21 am
noppid, it seems like you missed the point of what I was saying. A few years ago, there simply wasn’t a good way for any random Joe to pay their hosting costs for a website that’s a hobby or spare time passion. Self-server contextual advertising has changed that.
If that’s something you don’t appreciate, so be it. But I think we’re gonna look back on it in a few years as the start of something quite big.
You’re a full-time publisher. That’s quite different than what I was writing about.
April 24th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
I am actually very happy with the Yahoo! Ads I’m using on my sites. I was previously using ContextWeb ads and since I switched over to Ads by Yahoo!, my revenue has tripled.
My only problem with the Yahoo! ads is that they do not open in a new window. Since implementing the ads my page views have dropped a bit since the ads take the visitors away from my sites. Hopefully they will allow publishers the option to have ads open in a new window in the future.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:49 am
[…] The Yahoo! Publisher Network ads that appear on his sites allow David to keep publishing at minimal cost, recouping a little of the cash – and time – he spends keeping his blogs up to date. In other words, Yahoo! Publisher Network helps David promote his enthusiasms while helping “Pay the Bills.” […]
May 17th, 2006 at 2:23 pm
I agree with pupforum, opening the advertiser’s sites in a new window is something I wished for years. It would really “one up” the Google’s Adsense.
July 24th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
[…] Yahoo! Publisher Network » Blog Archive » It Pays the Bills … are not as great as adsense. Here is my theory: With Google Adwords, users can … become aware that it is an ad they are clicking on. As for YPN vs. Adsense. … months, I have earned 3x what Adsense pays … http://ypnblog.com/blog/2006/04/19/it-pay-the-bills/ […]
June 13th, 2008 at 9:22 am
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