I want Yahoo’s YPN to do well. Solid competition with Adsense is good for publishers. By commoditizing contextual advertising publishers will recieve a bigger chunk of the revenue pie.

That being said, Yahoo has some serious issues they need to work out before YPN comes out of beta. A recent post on the official Yahoo Publisher Network really made me realise how sloppy some of the things they have been doing are.

Number one: Yahoo says “we don’t want international traffic.” Filter the traffic out in the first place, don’t kick out legitimate publishers who aren’t even getting paid for the international clicks. Setting up geo-targetting in phpAdsNew is not easy for everyone.

Number two: Get in line with Google’s standards. Right now Yahoo makes general statements about not placing images next to ads, while Google is doing it themselves.

Number three: The recent things not to do post says “Don’t use inappropriate ad targeting. If your site is about flowers, it’s not cool to be targeting finance.” Why should that even be an option?

Number four: This statement on that blog post really sticks out to me “Don’t go nuts with the ads and place them all over every page like they’re your content or something. It looks like you are trying too hard.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? Perhaps that we should stick the ads in the yellow and white areas instead of orange?

Number five: Get rid of this delayed auditing stuff. Publishers need to know no later than tommorow what they made today. End of month auditing is like trying to drive a car with a patch over one eye.

I understand that YPN is still in beta, so these slip ups are understandable and excusable. However, these issues do need to be resolved.

Last week Yahoo’s stock took a serious hit. I don’t own any of their stock, or really understand the details around the drop. From what I heard it had to do with delays in their ad program.

All Yahoo has to do is make YPN as close to Adsense as possible, but pay more and Google’s revenues will start to slide while Yahoo’s rise. If Microsoft really wants to damage Google they should buy Yahoo and crank that revshare up to 95% or so; then Google will be in trouble!