Maintaining a Quality Network
As noted on certain message boards, some publisher accounts have been recently closed. These account closures were 
based solely on traffic quality issues.
Yahoo! Publisher Network is still an invite-only beta program. As such, we’re constantly refining the procedures and policies that will help maintain a quality network for our publishers and advertisers. And we won’t release the product to the general publishing community until we are able to serve our constituent’s needs well.
This is a learning experience for everyone, one of the main concerns for our 100,000-plus advertisers who participate is the quality of traffic they receive. For advertisers, we need to consider the source of traffic, the site content, click activity, and the overall quality of leads generated for our advertisers.
As publishers you are also concerned with quality – the quality and relevance of the ads you receive and how well they monetize on your sites.
If you have questions, the Yahoo! Publisher Network’s Terms and Conditions very specifically lay out the dos and don’ts of employing the Network’s ads. Please note there really is a lot of important, need-to-know information here. Be sure to review our Ts&Cs.
Maintaining the quality of our Network is vital to the success of everyone involved.
Thanks for reading and for helping us build the best contextual advertising network out there.
– Willan Johnson, Vice President and General Manager
| Post Comment | categories:: Announcements
May 4th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Thanks for addressing this, Mr. Johnson (and YPN). Much appreciated.
May 4th, 2006 at 5:34 pm
I have been waiting for a response to the talk on message boards from this blog. I am glad to see that you have made it clear to all publishers that quality of traffic is important, but I would love to learn even more concerning what exactly the standards for quality are.
For example, I run a wide variety of Websites, and a broad selection of categories throughout different sites. Different sites recieve different audiences, and as a publisher, I have to find a good medium between displaying the most relevant ads, and the ads that monetize my sites the best. Sometimes I find that some ad categories that do not seem very much related to the theme of multiple sites actually pays better than other categories, even though the clicks might be close to half of another category. Is this considered “less quality” since the ads are not as relevant, or does quality refer to more towards the source and leads?
It would also be nice for Yahoo to warn publishers if they are being flagged for poor quality. I am not that concerned for my own account (I honestly believe I offer some of the top quality content in several of my own sites for what I write about), but after reading what others have said, I do believe that it is a bit sudden for YPN to terminate an account, especially when the publisher cannot track leads to see if their traffic quality is nice. For webmasters with multiple websites, it would help them decide which sites, and possibly pages are worth monetizing, and which should be left alone.
Again, thanks for the update Willan!
May 5th, 2006 at 7:29 am
I publish a very targeted blog to the Search Marketing community. However, my YPN ads are not relevant to my content. I want to keep using Yahoo instead of *blank*, so I’ve been playing around in my account with Ad Targeting, and Ad Blocking. I’ve discovered that when I block specific non-relevant URL’s (like vonage.com ), I get an empty space where the YPN ads should be. This is very frustrating. Can you shed some light on how I can get more relevant ads?
May 5th, 2006 at 8:18 am
Quality control in this type of environment is crucial. If the advertisers are unhappy with the traffic that they’ve PAID for, they’ll simply stop paying for it. YPN makes less revenue and we as publishers make less revenue. Everyone loses.
I definitely applaud you guys for the way you handled this though. Adsense would have simply sent an email canceling the accounts without explanation or payment.
YPN has distinguished itself far above that and as always confronted this problem with CLASS.
Chuck Crawford
http://www.articles.pn
May 5th, 2006 at 9:33 am
I agree with DLeggett that a warning would be nice if a publisher’s website is causing concern of any kind. If the publisher can do anything to fix the problem it would be preferred to give the publsiher an opportunity to do so instead of just cutting them off. From experience and from what other publishers have said, it seems Yahoo is a much kinder, more pleasant group to work with than other ad services and I would hope they give publishers every chance to continue using the service.
May 5th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
I also agree with DLeggett, Yahoo should develop some type of warning that a publisher’s website is doing something negative and give them a chance to remedy the situation. Any additional details YPN can provide about the quality of traffic concerns it has would also be very helpfull.
Greg Lucas
May 5th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
It looks like many has been cut off for violation of 11(l)[not to] display all or part of the Ad Unit to any user located outside the US; A check for user country needs to be implemented before displaying the add.
May 9th, 2006 at 9:04 am
I also agree with DLeggett. Serious publishers are concerned about generating quality leads for their advertisers as much as YPN, so it would be a smart move to cooperate together and help them out, instead of cutting them off abruptly. Also, a lead quality/early warning system would be a smart feature that would differentiate YPN from its competitors.
May 10th, 2006 at 5:31 am
Agree with freecat.
I have 75% of the traffic form US, but also Canada and Europe.
I already kicked out my web-site the famous trouble making countries, but filtering countries to do not display the ads, it’s something above my possibilites. That’s something should be done on the feeder side. I see on many RSS feed i get they show a page like this: “sorry this ads is only for US audience.”
Beside, checking out some of the advertisers (not clicking on their ads :-)) I’ve noticed they do international business. So why not show ads to foreign countries?
May 11th, 2006 at 10:03 am
Do you allow a search page like http://www.playbetterhockey.com/search.aspx?keywords=juice . This guy has all his sites like that. I know Google does not allow that.
May 15th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
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May 17th, 2006 at 10:38 am
For the love of god, GET PUBLISHER OUT OF BETA. When will the rest of us get to actually USE THE SYSTEM?
May 22nd, 2006 at 3:57 pm
How’s this for poor quality traffic? I know of a person who runs blogs and websites that have nothing but RSS articles and Yahoo Publisher ads running on them. The fraudster joins co-ops where they click on each other’s Yahoo ads to make money. This person buys bulk garbage traffic in the form of pop-up and pop-under hits to make his hit/click ratio look reasonable. He has collected about $5,000 from Yahoo since February of this year. I can’t turn him unless I know that he wont go to jail.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:41 am
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August 21st, 2006 at 3:26 am
It was my understanding that you would get rid of sites with low-quality traffic but that is not what I’ve seen. There are still several large MySpace-oriented sites that:
1. Display irrelevant ads (what MySpace users goes to these sites looking for a Masters degree?)
2. Spams the user with Yahoo ads (if you don’t think a leadboard and two 300×250s side by side at the top are excessive, I don’t know what is)
http://freecodesource.com http://myspacesupport.com http://mypimpspace.com
Apparently these sites are making 6 figure incomes monthly at the advertisers expense.
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2997692&highlight=six%20figures%20monthly#post2997692
It’s crazy that you guys have not taken any action.
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