As some people may know, I run shownotes.info. And as anyone who’s looked at the shownotes.info wiki has probably noticed, I have had some adsense ads up for a while. I have been getting frustrated recently though because the ads are just so non-contextual. I don’t expect to get rich of selling ads on web pages, but I do think that if the ads that got served were a bit more relevant I would have a higher CTR and probably make a few more bucks.
So recently I decided to apply for the Yahoo! Publisher advertising beta test. Basically this is Yahoo’s adsense-killer (or at least adsense competitior). I didn’t know what to expect but I figured anything was worth a shot. So I signed up and got accepted. Recently I added Yahoo! ads to the bottom banner in hopes of highly targeted spot-on contextual ads.
Unfortunately it hasn’t quite worked out that way. The Yahoo! system is similar to adsense from a web master perspective. You have some limited but sufficient layout and color formatting options to set, and then you get some code to insert into your web page in the spot where you want to include your ad.
Google offers text and image ads these days. Personally I prefer the image ads as I think they stand out more and I’d rather see one pretty advertisement than a bunch of little text trolls. So with my Google ads I have them set to use image or text ads. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be that many image ads available. Or at least not for the topics and keywords that Google associates with my site. Or perhaps a lot of ads are available but Google just hates me. I don’t know. So I leave it on text or images because when I select image-only then I end up with a lot of PSAs.
For now, Yahoo! only offers text ads. I’m sure they’ll probably throw image ads in the mix once they get some of the beta kinks worked out of the system. Or not. Who knows. I don’t mind text ads so long as they’re contextual. I think readers will still click through if the ad pertains to a topic that interests them. And that was the primary river of trying Yahoo! – to get more relevant ads than I’ve been getting with adsense.
Unfrotuantely that doesn’t seem to be working out. The Yahoo! ads are making the Google ads’ contextual targeting look laser-guided. It seems like almost every page shows a Yahoo! ad for payday loans and mortgage refinances. In a way it’s not so bad because it appears these types of ads have high payouts per-click through. On the other hand my actual click-through rate has been rather…extremely limited.
I contacted Yahoo! support to see if there was anything I had screwed up in placing the ads that is making the content so irrelevant. They said no, it’s just that they’re still working on their contextual engine. As a site owner this is frustrating. It seems as though Google and Yahoo! will neither generate much revenue for me. I could probably sell the ad space directly and bypass these affiliate programs, but that would requier substantially more time and energy than I have.
I’ve picked the low hanging fruit from the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tree, but still no dice. Any suggestions are appreciated, as always.