AdMoolah News and Views

Digital Inspiration has release a new tool to preview ads for AdSense, YPN and Chitika. This is similar to Google’s AdSense preview tool that they have for Internet Explorer, but has some big advantages:

• Ads from AdSense, YPN and Chitika can all be previewed, including side-by-side comparisons of AdSense vs. YPN and AdSense vs. Chitika. This is very useful for seeing how the relevancy of ads compare across all three networks.
• The tool can show link unit ads and image ads
• They have a Firefox extension that will let you preview AdSense ads. I could never figure out why Google hasn’t done this themselves since they seem to be such big supporters of Firefox.

Read the Yahoo YPN, Chitika, AdSense Preview Tool announcement.

Found via Eric Giguere’s AdSense Blog

Not to be outdone by Google, Yahoo has sent some YPN publishers a gift as well. The gift is a stadium/picnic blanket and a greeting card that Yodels when opened. A good description of it can be found The Marketing Tools Review Blog.

As with the Google gift, there is no word on how much a publisher needs to earn before getting this gift.

Found via ProBlogger

YPN has added a feature to allow publishers to put ads in RSS feeds. This feature looks similar to the AdSense RSS ads and is open to all publishers in the YPN beta.

They have a brief description of the new offering:

Ads in RSS allows you to place ad listings within your RSS Feeds. The ad listings may be relevant to the content of your RSS Feed in general or to a particular post.

Ads in RSS enables you to:

* Provide targeted ads that are related to the content of your RSS Feeds.
* Generate additional revenue from your RSS Feed.
* Track the performance of multiple RSS Feeds or Posts.

This last point is particularly interesting. Not being able to get good statistics on how many people are reading feeds is a common complaint from publishers. It will be interesting to see how well this works.

There is now a new tab in the “Ad Setup” section of the YPN site.

This page walks you through the process of, 1. Registering a New RSS Feed or 2. Selecting an Existing RSS Feed; 3. Previewing Your RSS Ad Unit; 4. Copying Your RSS Ad Code; and 5. Updating Your RSS Feed Template.

A few things to note.

• RSS ads are currently only available for WordPress or Movable Type users.
• For WordPress, the ads can only be inserted into full text feeds only, not summary feeds.
• Ads can be generated for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds

Here is a sample of the ads:

I might try this out on a few blogs I have. I will probably not put the ads on the AdMoolah blog for now.

Kevin Scaldeferri, who is a Developer at
Yahoo! Search Marketing has an interesting post.

He is theorizing that one thing that could be affecting the CTR of YPN vs. AdSense could be the length of the ads themselves. Since Yahoo ads allow for a longer descriptions than AdSense does, it is possible that people reading them get a better idea if they really are interested or not. This would lead to a lower CTR, but better conversions.

I got a comment in my Is Rotating YPN and AdSense a Bad Idea? post, saying:

my name is paul mineiro and i’m a ypn developer.

i agree we need a blog, the miscommunication around this was pretty big.

so i started one:

http://360.yahoo.com/warezio

I think that’s fantastic. There are other bloggers who have done very well blogging while at big companies like Robert Scoble at Microsoft (or it might be this link now, he’s switching blogs) , Matt Cutts at Google, and Yahoo’s own Jeremy Zawodny. Hopefully Paul’s blog will be as useful as the aforementioned ones are.

Welcome to the blogosphere Paul! I’m looking forward to what you have to say.

Bloggers have been buzzing about Chitika eMiniMalls lately. Today Darren at ProBlogger posted some Chitika eMiniMalls Tips and Jennifer at JenSense has posted the Inside scoop on making Chitika eMiniMalls AdSense & YPN compliant.

Darren has reported making good money from eMiniMalls, and others have similar experiences. I have also been testing Chitika ads on a few sites for a several days, but my results don’t seem to be as spectacular. I think the problem is that my sites are not quite the right type of sites for eMiniMalls. They seem to do much better in consumer goods oriented web sites like gadget blogs.

Nonetheless, it is good to have alternatives when it comes to AdSense. AdSense, YPN and Chitika all need to compete for the same publishers, and different alternatives work better for some people than others.

I just read Tim Flights post: Rotating YPN and AdSense is a Bad Idea

It basically says that rotating between AdSense and YPN with every page view is a bad idea because it confuses the YPN bot and cause Run of Network (RON) ads. “PSA”s (It seems that’s what YPN calls the ads like vonage.com and flowers.com for some reason).

I’m not sure if I agree with this. When I rotate ads I usually get 2 or 3 on target ads and 2 or 3 off-target ads. So it seems like YPN knows what the page is about, they just show relevant ads in only half the ads, as if they don’t have enough inventory to fill all four or five ad positions in the ad unit.

I would be interested to hear more experience with this and to see if YPN has anything to say about it (they really need a blog). I might try experimenting with this a little myself.

(Found via ProBlogger)

Update: YahooSarah has cleared up the PSA terminology confusion on a Digital Point Forum post. They are actually RON (Run of Network) ads.

Update: Paul M, the YPN Developer with a blog, has fixed Tim Flight’s problem by having him re-enter his blocklist.

The New York Times has an article explaining how it is starting to sell its own ads instead of relying on Yahoo to sell ads. This is good news for publishers because it means we are one step closer to getting a third alternative to AdSense and YPN. They are starting to sell ads on some of their own web sites, but will expand to allow other publishers.

Here are some interesting bits from the article:

Microsoft also expects to use its new system to sell ads on other Web sites, just as Yahoo and Google do with their systems.

The MSN system, like other search-based ad systems, will let advertisers specify how much they will pay each time a user clicks on their ad. MSN will also let advertisers bid different amounts depending on the characteristics of the user who sees the ad.

He said that once Microsoft had a large number of advertisers and had refined its ad placement formulas, it would be able to compete with Google and Yahoo to sell ads on other Web sites because it would be able to offer higher ad revenue.

Update: Microsoft has an official press release.

I recently reported on my first week with YPN. Since then, YPN seems to be doing better on this Vegas-themed site.

For the last 8 days, YPN has actually been outperforming AdSense by 15%. If you don’t include the AdSense Link ads, the advantage jumps to 35%. This jump in earnings for YPN comes from both a boost in both CTR and CPC. This could be because there seems to be an additional targeted ad in YPN now, for the first week there only seemed to be 2 targeted ads, now there are 3 targeted ads.

Over the whole 15 days, things are pretty close. I’ll have to keep my eye on the results to see who the long term winner is.

I have been displaying YPN and AdSense ads on VegasFreebie.com for one full week. I have been randomly displaying either the AdSense or the YPN ads. When displaying AdSense I show one ad unit and one link unit. When showing YPN, only the single ad unit shows since link ads are not available on YPN. The overall winner so far is AdSense. Here is the bottom line: AdSense earnings were 27% better than YPN.

Comparing just the AdSense ad unit vs. the YPN ad unit (ignoring the AdSense link unit) the AdSense earnings are 7% better.

AdSense had better earnings because the CTR was just over double the YPN CTR. YPN does pay more per click than AdSense, but not enough to make up for the lower CTR. This corresponds to a lot of other reports I have heard about YPN, the click through rate isn’t very good, but each click pays better than AdSense.

I think the biggest problem with YPN at this point is that the ads are not targeted very well, and the same ads are displayed all the time. On the banner ad the same 4 ads are displayed all the time. Two of the ads are fairly well targeted: one for fishing trips around Las Vegas and one for a City Guide to Las Vegas. Two of the ads are not targeted at all: one is for Vonage and one is for 0% APR Credit Cards.

I tried the category based targeting that YPN offers, but this did not seem to help things. I chose up for the “Travel – Accommodations” category for the site and ended up getting ads for Hotels in Great Britain, Safaris in Botswana and Kayak Tours in British Columbia. Not exactly the types of things people would be interested in while at a site about Las Vegas. It seems like YPN needs to get a better inventory of ads to be able to show targeted ads.

I plan to keep experimenting with YPN on other sites to see if it may do better in different categories of sites.