Yahoo Publisher Network Confirms Revenue Problems
In response to complaints and accounts of droppings in earnings and revenue made via running Yahoo Publisher Network ads on web sites over the weekend, Sarah from YPN published this note on Digital Point.
Hi everyone,
I received more information this morning, so I hope I can provide a bit more clarity now. Last Friday we launched some new code into production. Several complications occurred during the launch, and as a result overall system performance was impaired. We’ve stabilized the situation now and expect to continue to make improvements over the next few days.
On behalf of the entire YPN beta team, I apologize for the inconvenience. Please continue to let me know how your sites are performing — your feedback is really valuable to us as we continue to refine our beta program and work through our growing pains.
YahooSarah
Drops in Yahoo Network CPM performance were widely reported at Digital Point today and yesterday:
“One of my sites with CPM of $200+ and several thousand impressions per day has dropped to $60, not happy.”
“Had about a 50% drop, followed by another 50% drop in a two day time span. This is very sad This has happened before, and the revenue did pick back up though, so I have not lost hope yet. I really hope this is the case.”
“Revenue down to nothing for me today, ads not displaying except the very relevant. Ie they’re displaying on about 2 of my 12,000 pages.”
Among the panic, one member AmCy.org reminds members that YPN is still in beta and to be patient:
I think it’s important to remeber that the YPN program is in beta mode right now, and that YPN hasn’t forced anyone to join the program. It’s beta, and participation is completely voluntary. We all have option of using other programs for now, and wait for YPN to go out of beta. As beta particpants, we are helping Yahoo! to test their nascent program, so I think we should all keep cool and provide as much useful feedback to the YPN team as we can.
Kudos to Yahoo for stepping into the forums to help clear things up and do a little damage control. I’m quite eager to see the Yahoo Publisher Network get off the ground and out of beta, but with a glitch in the system like this weekend’s which may lead to some losses of revnue, they may want to think twice about expanding the Publisher Network until these problems are taken care of.
Of course, from my experiences with YPN I’d say that their customer support is quite comforting in times of need and that the other contextual advertising offerings have also had their share of problems and downtime too.
