The Yahoo Publisher Network may be testing the blocking of YPN contextual advertisements from serving in certain countries according to the accounts of some webmasters who are running YPN on their sites.
In what may be an attempt to curb International click fraud and spillover of intended US audience only advertisements, reports have come in from various webmasters that YPN is not serving ads to International visitors, specifically India.
A thread was started last week on Webmaster World about this trend and one of my clients also reports similar findings:
YPN reports started showing my ad impressions down by about 20% on my two small sites running YPN. The YPN impressions reduction has been consistent ever since.
Meanwhile, both sites traffic has remained stable — as they have mostly been for several years.
My belief is that YPN has simply stopped displaying ads for untargeted countries (or stopped counting them). One of the two sites has a portion of its traffic from India — about enough to account for the report difference.
Although the blocking of displaying YPN ads outside of the United States may attribute to a hefty drop in revenue for some publishers, the end result will be beneficial for Yahoo & its advertisers and this is something YPN should have developed when they decided to limit their YPN Beta to the US only market.
The blocking of YPN ads to some International visitors does seem to be a test, as reports are claiming significant drops in revenue and International users are able to see YPN some days, and not others.
This may be one of the first initiatives by Yahoo Search Marketing’s new ‘Click Fraud Czar’ Reggie Davis :
Davis will hire a dedicated staff to manage across all of Yahoo!’s cross-functional quality teams and ensure that customer input is integrated into all efforts to address click fraud, traffic quality, network placement and other marketplace quality issues. Davis and his team will also be responsible for increasing Yahoo!’s dialogue with advertisers and publishers on quality related matters.
If you are a YPN publisher, are you experiencing similar drops in ad performance and International blocking?
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Update : 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.
