Yahoo’s “YPN” (for Yahoo Publisher Network) is Yahoo’s version of AdSense: Publishers sign up for the program and place special code on their website, which then serves up ads from Yahoo’s PPC advertisers who choose to participate in the “content network.” The publisher gets paid by YPN when site visitors click on the ads.

I’m not sure if this program is still in perpetual beta or if it’s in some sort of gamma, but Yahoo has a couple of fatal flaws in its implementation.

First, Yahoo does not permit the display of any other contextual advertising on the same page as a YPN ad. This means that publishers already using AdSense (or any other contextual advertising network) who want to give YPN a test run face an all-or-nothing proposition when it comes to using YPN, and many of them will choose nothing. If you use more than 1 ad block on a page, and you’re considering swapping out some of your Google AdSense ads for YPN ads to compare performance, you likely don’t want to remove all of your Google ads. Sure, you could use 2 YPN ads, and then on another page keep your 2 AdSense ads. But you might also have an AdSense block or link unit in the sitewide header or footer of your site, and you would have to remove that, change it to YPN, or use server-side programming to swap out the sitewide AdSense ad for a YPN ad on any page where you want to use YPN. That’s easy enough for someone who knows how, but completely beyond the technical skills of many successful AdSense publishers.

Yahoo loses points for this dumb requirement. Yahoo is doing nothing but sharply limiting the number of publishers who are even willing to consider trying YPN.

Second, and this is even worse, YPN’s program is limited to US-only. Yahoo’s TOS, which publishers have to agree to when joining the program, prohibits the display of YPN ads to any non-US site visitor. The World Wide Web is called that for a reason: it’s world-wide. There’s no quick or easy way for publishers to display YPN ads only to US visitors, and the methods that are available are not 100% effective.

Limiting your YPN ads to US visitors only involves the use of an IP database, which must be updated at least once a month, the use of server-side programming code to detect the visitor’s IP address and translate that to their country location, and then the use of more server-side programming code to show the YPN ads only if the visitor is in the US. And, for publishers who care about these things, yet more server-side programming code to display something else in place of the YPN ad to non-US visitors.

The publisher who goes to all this trouble to try YPN is engaging in an exercise in futility, because non-US web users frequently use proxy servers located in the US to surf US-based web sites. The publisher will, despite their best good-faith efforts, have some non-US visitors slip through the cracks and see YPN ads. And then the publisher stands to have his YPN account terminated by Yahoo for violating the YPN Terms of Service.

Yahoo’s decision to limit YPN to US visitors only is stupid enough on the face of it. But then placing the burden of screening out non-US visitors on the backs of the publishers is even more stupid. The geotargeting should be done by Yahoo, who must have software engineers and programmers on staff who are capable of impementing this type of thing. Even Yahoo’s own implemention would not be 100% effective, but Yahoo should also be capable of simply screening out clicks detected from non-US visitors — Yahoo would not charge the advertiser for the click, nor pay the publisher for the click, but the publisher would not be in danger of having his account terminated for failing to accomplish something that is impossible to accomplish.

I would like to try YPN, if for no other reason than that I don’t like having my ad income so heavily dependent on AdSense. But I’ll take a pass on YPN as it currently exists. If Yahoo ever adjusts their TOS to allow YPN and AdSense ads on the same page, and either lifts the US-only restriction or implements their own geotargeting, then I’ll probably give YPN a shot. Until then, it’s simply too much trouble, with too much risk, for unknown rewards.

Last month, Google made some change in its AdSense reporting interface that randomized the “top channels” listing in the main AdSense overview page, instead of listing them in order of top earning channels. They took something like a month to fix it.

But now that they’ve fixed it, they’ve broken something else. Two something elses, apparently.

First, when I load up a report grouped by channels, the channels used to be clickable — i.e., I could click on a channel to get a report specifically for that channel. Now, the channels are no longer clickable.

Second, when I load up a report, I get a pop-up error message while the report is loading that reads, “Error: e_report has no properties.” After I click “OK” the report loads just fine — although I guess it has no properties. Google is apparently concerned about this and thinks I should be too.

I guess it’s possible that Google only changed one thing, and the missing properties are the clickable channels. Or it might be 2 things. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

Dear Google,

I’d like my clickable channels back, please, and I could do without the warning about the e_report not having any properties.

Love,

Me