The good news is that this blog has been accepted into the beta of the Yahoo! Publishing Network. The bad news is that I was going to try to use the ads only within the RSS feed and leave them off of the blog for now, but I can’t. It’s (apparently) a requirement to run them on the accepted site itself.
Awhile back I attempted to switch to a donation drive rather than running advertisements. My hope was that people’s general dislike of ads would prompt the dropping of a buck here and there and as a result there would be no need to run any ads. I wasn’t expecting anything big, just a little something now and then. This was not working out at all. The click throughs on the donation link were almost exclusively from web bots.
So the choice that I have is to either possibly loose my membership in the Yahoo Publishing Network and maintain donation links
that were almost universally ignored, or to run the Yahoo! ads on my blog. The choice is pretty easy for me to do; I don’t want to lose the potential that these Yahoo! ads present.
From what I have seen from around the web, their contextual advertising is noticeably more accurate than AdSense. Flickr is a good example of where I have seen the Yahoo! contextual advertising be pretty well spot on.
I also like the idea of not having all of my eggs in one basket. This is a smart plan regardless of what it is that you’re doing. Running only Google advertisements always made me feel a bit uncomfortable. As far as I understand the rules, having access to both will allow me to mix it up a little as long as they never appear on the page together.
Personally, I think that it’s kind of cool to be accepted into their beta program and I look forward to seeing how well their system works. It’s unfortunate that I couldn’t stick with the RSS distribution system for now, but that’s the way that the blocks fall I suppose.
Good day folks,
~Mysk