Yahoo’s YPN Says No to MySpace Traffic
If you use MySpace profiles, blogs, comments, and mailings to spam or influence the teenie boppers over at MySpace to clickover to your website and that MySpace traffic is a major source of your visitors – beware! Yahoo Publisher Network wants little to do with serving their advertising to this demographic.
Darren Rowse of Problogger.net writes that YPN’s quality control team is cutting loose the MySpace traffic dependent websites from their contextual advertising network :
This morning I’ve had an email from a very disgruntled YPN publisher who has received a phone call from YPN saying that their account has been terminated because they have used MySpace to send traffic to their ‘legitimate’ website which has YPN. The thrust of the reason given to them for the termination was that the traffic being sent was not of a ‘high enough quality’.
Jen Slegg has a copy of the terminiation letter from Yahoo Publisher Network:
Hello {Publisher Name},
I have attempted to reach you personally to discuss this matter but the phone number we have is invalid.
As part of our efforts to ensure high-quality traffic for advertisers on the Yahoo! Publisher Network, we continuously monitor publisher attributes such as:
1. Sources of their traffic, including its geographical distribution.
2. Suspicious click activity.
3. Advertiser conversion rates.
4. Overall quality of leads generated on your site.
Unfortunately, due to poor traffic quality, we will be terminating your Yahoo! Publisher Network account ID as of end of day, Monday, May 1, 2006. In accordance with Sections 6(a) and 6(b) of the Yahoo! Publisher Network terms and conditions, we will not include clicks from non-U.S. users or otherwise invalid clicks in your payment. We have refunded amounts generated from the non-U.S. users and otherwise invalid clicks to our advertisers and will pay any remaining amount owed to you in accord with the Terms and Conditions.
Yahoo Publisher Network has terminated sites from their program in the past due to low quality traffic and low conversions via International visitors and click fraud, but Jen says this is a first for either Yahoo or Google AdSense to let a publisher go due to the quality of the sites which refer the bulk of that publisher’s traffic:
It has long been known that source of traffic can result in an AdSense suspension, but this is the first time it has been known that either AdSense or YPN has been targeting not only a single specific source of traffic, but also one that is somewhat legitimized as being a true site… as opposed to the “get 20,000 visitors to your site for only $19.99” variety that is usually targeted for being poor quality.
However, this definitely opens up questions about what other sites that YPN will target next?
For those of you who actually use MySpace, the poor quality of their enormous amounts of web traffic is a major reason for their monetization problems. MySpace only receives an average $0.10 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) in advertising revenue and as you’ll notice, most of their advertisers are screen savers, fart buttons and borderline porn video downloads which install AdWare and Spyware programs on the computers of children.
It’s a bit of a tough blow to publishers of MySpace oriented sites like MySpace skins, MySpace tutorials or MySpace hacks; but as a Yahoo Search Marketing advertiser and member of the Yahoo Publisher Network, I for one am quite happy to see that Yahoo is standing by their strict quality guidelines, which will keep cost-per-click prices up for publishers while leading to better ROI for advertisers.
