I have had a YPN account since Yahoo first started their PPC service. At first I joined in with the crowd and was excited to be a part of the YPN beta launch. At first it seemed everybody was making a lot more money with YPN than with Adsense and everybody who was anybody seemed to be supporting the jump to YPN. Well it’s now been a few years and I have to say that I’ve gone back to Google for PPC publishing.

Yahoo promised all sorts of targeting and higher percentage payouts than Google. This all sounds nice when you hear it but even now Yahoo has not managed to perfect their targeting system. Based on some experimenting I did with Google and Yahoo on the same site (on alternating page loads) it turned out that Yahoo DOES in fact generate more money per click, but, the problem is that Adsense gets more clicks.

I’ve now gone back to Adsense exclusively and do not have Yahoo running on any of my main websites anymore. I might have it on a few of my less trafficked pages but that’s mostly because I haven’t had the time to go and swap it out on my smaller sites necessarily. Even so, once making the switch back to Adsense I can already see a nice increase in clicks per day.

I’m not trying to get people to change their minds about Yahoo Publisher Network. If it is working for you in your niche then by all means stick to your guns, but, if you are like me and can settle for more clicks at less money per click then go for it. The fact of the matter is that both of them seem to have their purpose. Certain websites may notice a better return by publishing one ad type over the other, but, in the long run I think it’s safe to say that Google certainly has more experience in this field. They have obviously done many things right and I think it’s safe to expect more where that came from.