Ads by Yahoo!

You may have noticed that there’s a few “Ads by Yahoo!” popping up on the site. I signed up for the Yahoo! Publisher beta program to see how it performs. My only comparison is Google’s AdSense program and so far, I still like Google. The main reason being image ads. Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have an option to show image ads instead of text ads. I don’t have enough information to compare whether image or text ads perform better, but the image ads (can) look better.

Another big gripe is that the Yahoo! ads aren’t completely valid HTML. Seeing that little yellow warning icon in my browser corner (thanks to the HTML Validator extension) is really annoying, especially considering the time I take making my site as valid as possible.

A nice feature of Yahoo! Publisher is the availability of RSS ads. Personally, I haven’t seen too many RSS ads, but the idea is cool. Though, the downfall is that Yahoo! only provides instructions for integrating the RSS ads into WordPress and Movable Type generated feeds. Since I’m using a combination of my custom feed script and FeedBurner I’ll have to perform some kind of hackery to get them to work correctly. And that’s only if I think it’s worth advertising in my feeds. Maybe there will some kind of FeedBurner - Yahoo! RSS advertising relationship. That’d save me some time.

Using my ad management program I have the display probability for both Google and Yahoo! set to the same amount. The caching system might throw off the accuracy of that probability, but it will still be interesting to watch the performance.