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YPN vs. Google AdSense: Yes, it is a clash of the titans, King Kong vs. Godzilla all over again. Who will be left standing at the end of the battle?

Hopefully the answer will be “both of them”! Or better, them AND MSN as well. A little competition is a very good thing for us webmasters.

I have been running YPN on one of my sites for about a week and so I can report on how it stacks up against Google.

The first and biggest question is “how does it perform”? Ideally I should do a proper split test of YPN vs. Google on a few hundred pages and see which wins. Split testing means switching between the ads — first one person gets one and then the next person gets the other and so on.

Since both Yahoo and Google have exclusivity clauses that say their ads can not be shown on the same page with context-based ads (i.e. ads that figure out themselves what are the important keywords on the page and then serve ads accordingly) from other services I think that split-testing would be pushing the envelope of acceptibility, at best. I am not going to go there.

But in the meantime I have put YPN ads boxes on a number of my pages. The results are great — these ads are definitely competitive with AdSense’s. That is a huge relief because I don’t have to worry that Google will one day ban me for something I didn’t know about. I mean I am still worried, but if they dump me I will just move all my business over to YPN.

I am not surprised that YPN performs well. Yahoo has no choice but to deliver like Google does or better since Google already dominates the field. If Yahoo wants in they are going to have to compete successfully as I said here.

What about everything else? Well, YPN seems pretty close to an AdSense clone in many ways. The ad units come in the same shapes with the same color-setting options, the reporting is the same, etc. They even make the same mistake as Google by creating a long digit string for each channel in the JavaScript instead of just letting us use text strings that actually make sense. Presumably this is more accurate than using words in case a digit gets dropped but I am sure that if they wanted to they could get around this like Chitika apparently does with their “minimall” ad units. (More on Chitika later in another post. Sign up here to try Chitika out. )

I mean, I am sure there is one guy at Yahoo who is the one with the Google AdSense account so the Yahoo!ligans can check out what they need to do to keep up. Eventually Google will do the same for YPN. Or more correctly, I am sure they also have an account at their competitor’s service but for Google it is more of a question of looking back and trying to stay ahead rather than keep up.

So far YPN definitely is losing in the account features department, but not by much. For example, they don’t have up-to-the-hour stats for today like AdSense does. That really hurts when I am experimenting with something new and want to see how it is going but I assume that this feature will get added eventually. They already seem to be making progress — their “Daily Balance” feature is actually starting to be updated more than once per day, which wasn’t the case a few days ago.

YPN also lacks electronic payments, a competitive ad filter, AdLinks, a search option, substitute ads in case there are no matching advertisers, etc. And no option to refer others to YPN and get a commission.

On the other hand, YPN offers the option to put your earnings into your Yahoo! Search Marketing (i.e. Overture) advertising account if you have one, an option which Google has absurdly not included thus far. But now they will have to…

Where Yahoo is obviously trying to get ahead of Google is with their offering code for RSS feeds. They are also pushing integration with some of their other services, but so far for free. (Hint: pay us and we will be more likely to play along.) Google is going to have to follow suit. MSN… Well, we’ll see about them.

The bottom line: don’t dump AdSense yet… Get both services and watch them fight it out. May we all win!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 7:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.