For those of you who have heard the false news that Yahoo Publisher Network will be spreading Internationally, be warned, they have no intention of taking YPN out of the United States anytime in the near future. I foresee YPN holding back its International expansion timeline until the complete global rollout of Yahoo Search Marketing Panama is finished (I’m thinking Q4 2007).
Barry Schwartz post on SE Roundtable that he’s fed up with blogs and forums posting fake bulletins about YPN’s International growth and obtained this statement from the Yahoo! company:
YPN continues to be an invite-only beta program for US publishers. We have been focused on measuring publisher quality and learning more about the types of sites that perform well in our network. Though we are in the process of finalizing requirements and prioritizing markets for global launch plan, we do not have any immediate plans for international roll out.
Of course one of the challenges YPN faces is limiting its exposure to certain countries and specific areas, something which should be controllable via the Yahoo Search Marketing geo-targeting option, but does not seem to work correctly. YPN has instead left the responsibility of geo-targeting their contextual ads to the publishers, who are not doing so due to complexities on the publisher side.
Last week we reported that YPN may be blocking the serving of some of their advertisements to users in non-US English proficient countries, such as India and Pakistan. Some publishers were seeing 20% drops in impressions, ad revenue and clicks while users in India have said that they have been served blank ads where YPN ads should be from time to time.
Kristen Wareham, Sr. Manager, Communications at Yahoo! Publisher Network issued this statement to Search Engine Journal;
The Yahoo! Publisher Network beta is intended to serve advertisers seeking to reach high-quality U.S. customers. Those advertisers pay for traffic from Yahoo’s network of publishers, and it’s of the highest importance to Yahoo! that our advertisers continue to receive the highly targeted traffic they have come to expect from Yahoo!.
Although we haven’t launched any changes recently, we continually enhance and update our various policies and filters, and we will periodically make changes that can impact our marketplace.
