Yahoo! Publisher Network

» see publisher.yahoo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

yahoo publisher network was the contextual-ad product yahoo built to compete with google adsense. you pasted a javascript snippet on your blog, yahoo crawled the page, yahoo served cost-per-click text or display ads keyed to the content, you got a revenue share when someone clicked. it launched on 2 august 2005 in closed beta and never exited beta in its life.

i never used ypn. i could not have used it. the signup page asked for a us federal tax id and a us mailing address, and the program never accepted publishers outside the united states. that geographic line was on the signup page in 2005 and it did not move. in turkey in 2005 the only realistic adsense alternative was adbrite and chitika, and most people just ran adsense.

the program had real publishers. some of them made real money. the 2006 to 2008 ypn forums archive shows blogs reporting cpms in the low single digits with occasional good months. but ypn never matched the depth of adsense's advertiser pool. the targeting was thinner and the geographic coverage was thinner still.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

2005 was the year yahoo still believed it could be a search-advertising business. overture was inside yahoo (acquired 2003) and its search-side ad product became yahoo search marketing. ypn was the publisher-side companion, taking the same advertiser pool and routing it onto third-party sites. the framing inside yahoo was that the network effect would compound: more sites carrying ypn ads would make the advertiser pool more valuable to keep advertising with yahoo on the search side.

the network effect did compound. it just compounded for google. by 2007 adsense had two orders of magnitude more advertisers and a far broader publisher script footprint. ypn was always the second option a publisher tried after getting kicked out of adsense.

~ the fall ~

in may 2006 ypn ran into a click-quality scandal. it had been accepting myspace layout sites as publishers, and the traffic on those sites was largely teen attention parked on heavily decorated profile templates. the ads were not converting. yahoo terminated a batch of accounts and tightened acceptance rules. the affected publishers screamed on the ypn forum for months.

after that ypn never grew. it kept beta status. yahoo kept it running on inertia. the 29 july 2009 microsoft search deal then took the rest of yahoo's interest away. under the deal, bing would power yahoo search and bing ads would power the advertiser side. ypn became surplus to requirements, and was not part of the new joint venture.

~ how it actually ended ~

yahoo notified ypn publishers on 31 march 2010 that the program would close on 30 april 2010. the notice email told publishers to go set up accounts at chitika, which had pre-built a migration flow for them. the chitika referral was the most notable thing in the shutdown notice, since it was unusual for a closing program to hand its audience to a direct competitor. that is how cleanly yahoo had decided ypn was not part of the future.

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