I received a nice surprise in my inbox this morning:
Thank you for applying to participate in the Yahoo! Publisher Network beta program. We’re excited to let you know that your application has been accepted.Naturally, I signed up as quickly as possible and pasted some ad code into my site. This process was very straightforward, much like AdSense. But after I pasted the ad code into my site, I realized that YPN is nowhere near as refined as AdSense. According to the YPN FAQ, I should have seen public service ads while waiting for the context-targeted ads to appear.
Your Yahoo! Publisher Network ads will usually begin appearing within seconds of pasting the ad code into your web pages. If no ads are available, public service announcements will be displayed. If you prefer, you may select a Substitute Color that matches your web page background so that a solid color block appears in the meantime instead.But I didn’t seeing anything. All that the YPN code provided was an empty iframe. Sure, it had the CSS for the ads in place, but there was no content inside the body of the html document. The “substitute color” option worked, but I got no PSAs. This really looked bad on my sites, so I thought that I might not get to try out YPN.
Fortunately, however, the matter was resolved within a couple of hours. I went back to my test page after doing some other work, and the ads were there. When I have some solid data on the earnings, I will write up a summary of my experiences. I’ll leave you with this for now, though: Yahoo has a long way to go to catch up with AdSense.
