Yahoo Ads Beta Flops; Moving Back to Google

I agreed to participate in the beta for Yahoo Ads because they would let me put ads in the feeds, unlike Google; but it was clearly not ready. The targeted ads were incredibly poorly targetted compared to Google AdSense. Perhaps that was just a function of fewer advertisers. I don’t know. However there were two problems that were definitely Yahoo’s fault and convinced me it just isn’t as smart a company as Google:

1. They were never able to successfully serve an ad in the feed. I never saw anything but a placeholder ad for Yahoo Publisher Services.
2. It tooks days for them to respond to every bug report I filed on this if they responded at all. (Half the time I got no response at all.) When they did respond, it would become clear that they had completely misread the bug report. As far as I can tell the bug report never got past low level technical support that did not understand and could not fix the problem. I’m still not sure if they ever understood what the problem was. Now this is a beta, so I expect there’ll be bugs; but when there are bugs the developers and the reporter need to communicate in near real time. Yahoo was incapable of doing that.

I guess I’ll just wait for Google to open up its BlogAds to the broader AdSense community. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with various options to include Amazon Associates ads in the feeds.

Update: Yahoo did finally get back to me with some useful information. It currently seems that the bug is some as yet undiagnosed interaction between Safari/Webkit and the Yahoo code. Non-Webkit based newsreaders may be able to see the ads. The problem is not unique to my site. This is all my hypothesis, not theirs. I don’t know what they’re up to. Of course, this could have been determined in 30 minutes of back and forth instead of weeks of confusion and unanswered e-mails. The fundamental problem remains that the developers are hiding from the beta testers.

Update to the update: Yahoo concurs. They’ve reproduced the problem, and it does seem to be an Apple/Webkit issue. If they can get this fixed, I may give this another shot. Question: did anyone ever see any contextual ads in the feeds at any point? If so, were they any good?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 7:25 AM and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.