Yahoo’s Publisher Network not counting clicks, and doesn’t care


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So as most of my usual readers may have noticed my site had been been experimenting with Yahoo ads from the Yahoo Publisher Network. I wanted to know how well Yahoo ads that looked exactly like Google ads would perform. So I signed up for Yahoo’s Publisher Beta Ad Network and added Yahoo ads where Google ads were.

After a week of having Yahoo Ads up I realized something was horribly wrong. My site went from profitable to making absolutely nothing in a matter of one week. So my first thought was that there was something wrong with the tracking on the Yahoo Ad. I sent a email to their support to get this response.

After further investigating your click activity concerns, we do confirm that you have not been receiving clicks from May 1st, 2007 to May 7th, 2007. We were able to see there are Yahoo! Publisher Network ads properly displaying on your website “ http://www.noheat.com/“.

All impressions and clicks will be verified through our proprietary click protection system which may cause some discrepancies between your Web logs and your Y!PN Reports.

Here are some reasons why your web counter may not capture the correct amount of traffic to your site.

- Proxy servers are computers that act as agents for multiple users. Some of the ways that the proxy-server technique is used are as follows; they all cause IP addresses to not be unique for each person or even for each computer using the proxy server:

- Corporate firewalls usually send all Internet traffic from just one public IP address, even though there may be hundreds, thousands, or more persons using computers with private, unobservable IP addresses behind the firewall.

- Internet service providers typically reuse a relatively small pool of public IP addresses to service a much larger number of persons connecting to the Internet via dial-up. America Online traffic is especially consolidated in this regard.

- Most residential and small business broadband connections (such as via DSL or cable modem) get their IP address dynamically. Depending on the policies of the Internet service provider, these IP addresses may be reused infrequently or frequently

- Public internet access, especially wireless access, is becoming much more common in hotels, coffee shops, airports, public parks in large cities, and other venues. In these cases, as with corporate firewalls, all traffic for a site, region, or even the entire country enters the public Internet through one or a few IP addresses.

We value your business and we will make ourselves available to you via telephone during our standard support hours. You can reach the Yahoo! Publisher Network support team at (866) 785-2636. Our hours are Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Pacific Standard Time.

So I responded, stating that one of my ways of measuring stats besides my logs were MyBlogLog a Yahoo property that was clearly showing clicks on their ads. At this point after making nothing for a week, and seeing clearly that their tracking was not working I reinstalled Google’s Adsense and sent one last ditch email to Yahoo’s Publisher Network only to get this response…

I do apologize for the issues related to your reporting. As you are aware, Yahoo ! Publisher Network beta program policies prohibit the display of Yahoo! contextual ads on web pages with excessive or duplicate advertisements. In addition, Yahoo ! ads may not displayed simultaneously with contextual ads from another provider. Please note that publishers are permitted to rotate Yahoo! ads with those from other providers.

So basically it works out this way, if you sign up for the Yahoo Publisher Network. You display their ads making no money, try to recover lost funding with another affiliate and they tell you to talk to the hand. The funny thing is you would think the Yahoo Publisher Network would be eager to steal me away from Google’s Adsense, but they weren’t even willing to try.

Read more posts by Christopher Carey

May 10, 2007 | Filed Under Yahoo 

Comments

2 Responses to “Yahoo’s Publisher Network not counting clicks, and doesn’t care”

  1. thehoffisfat on MyAvatars 0.2 May 11th, 2007 7:48 pm

    This is why Adsense is number 1 and yahoo sucks. Go ahead Microsoft buy em! Like we care, Google actually pays.

  2. webwizzer on MyAvatars 0.2 May 21st, 2007 3:15 pm

    Yahoo just wanna keep up with Google… i guess they just can’t… Google rules…

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