Earlier this week Yahoo sent out an email to Yahoo Publisher partners (third party sites that display Yahoo cost per click ads). The email says they should expect new pricing adjustments “based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming” from their sites.
Yahoo (and its competitors) make adjustments to CPC payments out to publishers based on the perceived “quality of traffic.” Supposedly these payments are credited to advertisers, but there is really no way to know. The changes Yahoo implemented appear to make more dramatic adjustments to outbound payments.
The result of the change, say two publishers we spoke to, is a drop in already-low revenue payments.
“I’d describe the drop as annoying, but not devastating,” said one publisher. But he added that “The way they do it is in a total black box and leaves us helpless to improve things. Yahoo gives you ZERO insight into what bad traffic is or looks like so you can do NOTHING to improve the quality of the traffic you bring to Yahoo.”
Yahoo is also saying that in some cases they will increase payments to publishers with higher-quality traffic. The publishers we spoke to about this are skeptical.
More reports from publishers should get to us over the next few days, and we’ll update this post with new information.
The email is below:
Quality-based pricing is an important component of our goal to deliver high-value traffic to our advertisers, a high-quality experience for users, and long-term success for our distribution partners.
On September 9, 2009, Yahoo! upgraded the quality-based pricing system which adjusts advertiser click charges based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network. The new version of quality-based pricing may result in discounts being applied across more keywords, and/or deeper discounts for lower-quality traffic. Additionally, for the first time, it may also result in a pricing premium for higher-quality traffic. This enhancement will affect our Sponsored Search and Domain Match traffic only.
If you have any questions regarding this upcoming change, please contact your account representative.
adsense whoo
You lie !!1
QBP, quality based pricing is a critical service to be able to spread CPC ads out to non-search pages.
AdRocket uses QBP with a number of ad partners and would love to add Yahoo to that mix now that they can match CPC to traffic quality. This is GOOD for publishers, not bad, in that many channels could not be used by Yahoo when CPCs bids were fixed, regardless of where they were served.
Yahoo! please contact me about distributing your ads!
scott@adrocket.com
Good move! But why don’t Yahoo expose conversion data to partner sites.? If they did that, it’d be a great start for expanding their quality.
both adsense and yahoo don’t provide transparencies…at least some of the ad networks do..
The expansion of Yahoo in advertising is a good initiative, but drop in the revenue payments may affect publishers. Of course, Yahoo could have had a conversation with partner sites before announcements. How far this move is going to be supportive is to be seen in the future.
At long last! It’s a constant struggle to monitor and block most of Yahoo’s awful search partner traffic to allow the good (in fact, brilliant) ones to maintain a good CPA. I would think it’s perfectly easy to measure the quality of traffic based on conversion data collected by advertisers opting in and numerous other comparative metrics.
Yahoo doesn’t expose conversion data to partner sites. If they did that, it’d be a great start.
I agree, Google did this a looong time ago w/ quality control and all it does is filter out the garbage sites. This won’t affect the publishers that bring a good return, and may even increase their payouts.
You are assuming that the site being advertised isn’t garbage, good traffic or not wont covert on a terrible landing page regardless.
Why don’t they start doing something about the quality of the ads instead of the quality of the sites. I’d never have YPN ads on my site because half of them are for
“1 Rule to a Flat Tummy”
or
“Cindy, a mother from {Boise, Idaho} discovered the secret to whitening teeth for free”
and other scam ads run by N**** C****, S****r and the whole gang they hang around with.
I mean, Google has occasional scam ads in the middle of honest ads; YPN has an occasional honest ad in the middle of scam ads. Scam ads scare away real advertisers, and they drive down advertising rates… You know that the clickthrough on the “1 Rule” ads has to be pretty close to zero.
YPN has to stop scammers from poisoning the well, and if they do that, like Facebook and Google have, there’s a chance they’ll make some real money. Otherwise they are d00med.
No comment
Wow. What a coincidence.
You are leaving Tsavo this week; And this week Yahoo introduced QBP.
Come on. Spill the beans man. What do you know that we don’t ?
Speaking of quality:
The headline should read “Yahoo Expands Quality-Based Pricing”.
Compound adjectives require a hyphen.
Wow. Life must be pretty frustrating for you.
Huh.. quality based pricing… LOL
Thanks for the English lesson, Dasein.
I work for an PPC marketing agency and we generally don’t advertise on the Yahoo content network because of the extremely poor quality of the traffic. If Yahoo’s fix works to reduce the cost, we’ll be doing more Yahoo content advertising. Google made this change at least a few years ago and their content network keeps getting better.
We run Yahoo PPC ads as sponsored results on top of our business listing search results, and since they made the change our revenue per click has almost doubled. So we were pretty happy with whatever change they made!
Ads are so sloppy on a website.
Ad revenue is so slippery and unpredictable.
I don’t like ads.
Sam I am.
Yahoo still has a PPC content network? I thought that died a long time ago!
Reminds me of:
http://www.theo...tent/node/34696
NEW! 30% Costlier!
For the past year, when I look at the ppc reports each month for domains pointed towards different Yahoo feeds, I keep saying – “how could they get worse?”
I’m not talking about junkie domains.
I’m referencing solid, generic domains that receives consistant, natural traffic. The revenue just keeps spiraling downward.
Yahoo’s new adjustment will force us to point more towards Google and escalate our domain development schedule.
Yahoo can lick my balls
Yahoo has had a content score (let’s you know what the quality of your traffic is) for some time now. For parking companies I beieve that TrafficZ is the only parking provider that actually has a monitoring system put into place to let you know.
I think this is more about weeding out the crap traffic and less about squeezing the last drops of blood from an already dry stone.
TC you guys should try to get info from Frank Schilling (www.7mile.com). He’s got a direct Yahoo feed and one of the better deals financially. If any publisher will be able to give you feedback regarding this with some real accuarte data he’s your guy.
Yahoo is one the worst players in the PPC market. Better off working with Google or AOL.
Yahoo will never attract quality publishers because the payout is so damn piss poor. If Yahoo wants quality then they’ll have to pay for it. High quality publishers who use Adsense will only migrate to Yahoo Publisher Network when they produce a payout that’s not a complete joke. That means if they want to compete, they need to accept the idea that they will have to get by on thinner margins until they’ve branded themselves as a viable competitor. Yahoo, you have to pay to play! Haven’t you figured that out??? Lo these many years.
How quick the tide changes!!!
Yahoo,what do you get except mony by doing this?