..and the Golden Globe winner for best comedy: YPN

January 16th, 2007 by Chris

The incompetence of YPN reached a new height today.

I was one of the thousands of publishers kicked out of YPN for serving ads to international visitors. As I dicussed in the linked to blog post I find it absolutely ridiculous that YPN lacks the resources to implement their own geotargeting system. How do they expect to combat things like click-fraud if they cannot even discern different countries?

Anyways, today I received a cold call from a YPN telemarketer asking me to join with my literature site, the exact same site that caused my account to be terminated (with it’s massive 20% international audience). The call itself was somewhat funny, the script she was reading from made it seem like she thought she was talking to an absolute novice to online publishing and, even if she didn’t know who I was, had she even looked up my site she would have seen I already had ads on it and so likely knew how ads worked.

I explained I would love to join YPN with this site, and in fact had I not said anything I’m sure the woman would have created my account, but I mentioned that I had been kicked out previously for sending international traffic.

She had to go confer with an “account specialist” to see if there was anything she could do. 5 minutes later she called me back and said no, she couldn’t sign me up for that site.

However, she, probably desperate to get her quota, asked if I had a different site she could sign me up for. I gave her information for my wilderness survival site, which is 97% US, and she said I should be getting my account details in a few days. Of course YPN’s guidelines state that you can use their ads on any site you own once accepted, so long as the individual sites do not conflict with their selection criteria (no porn, spam, warez, etc). So guess what I’m going to do?

I think this time I’ll try out John’s geotargeting script, but I still do intend to give them a trial on my literature site.

So let us see, what good has YPN done?

      They failed to implement their own basic geotargeting system, and are constantly hurting their reputation and their pocketbooks by kicking out publishers who send in even small amounts of international traffic.
      After kicking me out they paid me $45 to take a survey about my satisfaction with their program… note, they were in error, they thought I was still a member.
      The program has been in public beta for what? A year and a half now? Do they ever hope to compete with Google?
      They cold call me to try to entice me to signup with a website that they previously kicked out.

Yahoo needs to get their act together, this comedy of errors they have going on belongs in the back of Business 2.0 with a big fat broken arrow.

Oh… if you search on Google for “Yahoo Publisher Network Review” guess who currently holds position #2? I do not claim to be that famous or influential, but come on? Surely my tiny bit of influence should be enough to make sure my account with them is handled with a little common sense?

Oh well, lets see if I get kicked out again.

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Posted in: Ad Networks »  by: Chris

4 Responses to “..and the Golden Globe winner for best comedy: YPN”

  1. Andrew Johnson  Says:
    January 16th, 2007 at 6:20 pm

    The sad thing is Yahoo has so much growth potential, its a joke that they screw up the most basic stuff. On the advertiser end of things, its just as bad.

    I’ve had whoever is “managing” my account change ad copy on me, crank up bids from pennies to dollars, I think this is borderline fraud. And I know this isn’t a mistake or bug on my end because when I complained via e-mail the exact response was — oh, I will make a note of that for the account manager to stop changing those things.

    To top it all off there is another advertiser who had a Yahoo employee (based on the originating IP) make derogatory comments on his blogs.

    What the hell is going on over there? I expect companies to make mistakes, things fall through the cracks and so on. Yahoo is reminding me more and more of Sony — making one bad decision after another.

  2. Pat McCarthy  Says:
    January 17th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    A bit self-promotional, but using RMX Direct (http://direct.rightmedia.com/) is a free and easy way to geotarget visitors for distribution to ad networks.

    I’ve personally sent on this post to YPN post on to some people I know over there.

  3. Farmer77  Says:
    January 18th, 2007 at 7:11 pm

    Hey Chris, if you ever have a YPN invite, I would like to have one. :P

  4. Chris  Says:
    March 29th, 2007 at 8:55 am

    I never got the confirmation email from them about my account for my survival site.

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