The Many Happenings

There are a million Adsense vs. YPN articles out there, but this one is different. This one will be based upon a different opinion, and ultimately contain a different conclusion. If you think you have already made your choice of a preferable publisher network to run on your site, you may want to think again.

Let’s start back many years ago when I signed up for Google Adsense, (if you would like to get to the part about which service is actually better and skip my rant about Google Adsense, control+F to the part of “Oh Jambalaya.”) I was extremely thrilled upon receiving the welcoming email, stating that my oh so unpopular site was accepted. At this point, Google Adsense was quite new, and they seemed to have accepted any site that applied.

So I logged in, created some sleekly looking advertisements, and pasted their code on my site. Almost instantaneously the ads became active, and they were extremely relevant too. The few readers that I had that was actually interested in what I was talking about, would also be interested in the displayed ads as well since they looked like relating links from the article. (I won’t express which site this was at this time, because it failed miserably a long time ago. I still mourn to this date.)

Anyway, so the ads were up, they fit with my theme, and off the money-making road I went. I knew I wouldn’t be making much at the time because I wasn’t getting an extreme amount of traffic, but it was still mellow, and I made a few dollars a day. I tried the referral ads, where people click on a button and download Firefox or some Google software. At that time, the conversion rate was a $1, now it’s only a measly 10cents or so. But I had a few people sign up which made my account reach around $100. $100 is the minimum amount they would pay out. So I put in all of my contact information and I eagerly awaited my check. This check would be hard proof that I could make money on the internet. That making money on the internet actually exists, and that this is something I could actually do for the long haul and be able to put food on the table. But alas, that next day, I got that dreadful email that so many Google Publishers have received. The, “Your account has been banned due to invalid clicks, and the money you have made has been returned to their respective advertisers” email. What? My what has what? Invalid clicks? My money is being given away to people who have already advertised on my site and made money off me? No wai.

Okay, I’ll stop with the monologue, but it was still quite traumatizing because I had lost the first $100 I made on the world wide web. I had never once clicked on my own ads, told anyone to do so, nor had the intention to do either. This is simply an error I thought, so I emailed the appeal office to await their reply. They indeed did reply, but they said that multiple users from the same IP address clicked on the ads many times and that due to fraudulent clicks, my account was banned. I emailed them again and told them that I had no idea this was going on, that I work for a large office building that every computer has the same IP, so there could have been some mix-up, and I assured them I did nothing wrong. They never responded.

Oh Jambalaya. So even though Google and I may have had some mishaps, I will now truly give the differences between and say which one I prefer, and that you should prefer as well, if you choose to do so.
Both services operate the same way. They both have advertisers that pay for keywords and keyword campaigns that then, in return, advertise on the publisher’s sites with their publisher programs. Both services are based on relevant content, and after using both services, Google seems to do a better job at that. They seem to have better software, or better ads, or a combination of both, to display more relevant ads than what Yahoo! has to offer, but things have gotten better for them since they first launched. However, to do a true experiment about which service will make more money, I did an experiment.

I changed all of the ads on most of my projects to Google Adsense for a period of 24 hours. During this period, the ads received an impression count of around 45,000. Immediately after I put them up, relevant text ads were displayed, and off we went. After the 24 hour period I checked the stats and found that I made a decent sum, but a lot of the impressions weren’t counted. Why is this? Google Adsense has such strict security measures that they might not count every single impression or click. The impression count in the Adsense dashboard was extremely less than how many impressions they really had.

So then I took the Yahoo! ad code and placed them in the exact same spots. It was during a day on the weekend, where more traffic occurs, so I decided I would pull them right when they hit 45,000. The ads they displayed were relevant, but they didn’t cycle as much as the Google Adsense ones. Google Adsense seems to not only have the more relevant ads, but they have more of them as well.

After taking them down and looking at my report, I was truly shocked. Yahoo! Publisher Network showed a much more accurate impression count than what Google Adsense had. Unlike Adsense, Yahoo only updates your total every 24 hours, but the earnings and impression count were much more to my liking and precise. If Google had given me every single impression, then I would have made closer to what Yahoo paid me. But, since Yahoo counts every single impression, and there isn’t much of a chance they would ban you like they did to me many years ago, I am going to stick with Yahoo! A publisher sticks with the service that pays him or her the most, and for me, that is the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Now this post is different because all the others I have read on the internet say that the winner is Google Adsense. Sure, they have better and more ads, more customization options like the software download referrals, but Yahoo! is more accurate, they are going to pay you better, and they are going to be getting even better with the newly announced Yahoo! Amp!, an amazing service for advertisers, which I will cover once it’s released. Yahoo! Amp! will bring even more ads to the Yahoo! marketplace, and because of all this, I’m sticking with the YPN, and I recommend you give them a try.

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