In my efforts to test a wide variety of advertising programs, I gave Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) a try. YPN is Yahoo’s answer to Google Adsense. YPN provides contextual ads based on the content of your website.

A few days after applying on the site, I was accepted to the program. Getting the code to place on your site is very easy, and the interface is similar to Google Adsense. One interesting wrinkle that distinguishes YPN from Adsense is that they also allow you to select ad categories for the ads to show on your website.

There are 20 high level categories that you can choose from (Apparel and Jewelry, Automotive, B2B, Books-Movies-Music-Tickets, Computing, Education and Career, Electronics and Appliances, Entertainment and Social Event Services, Financial Services, Flowers and Candy, Health and Beauty, Home and Garden, Mass Merchants, Professional Services, Real Estate, Reference, Sporting Goods, Telecommunications and Internet Service Providers, Toys and Hobbies, Travel) and each category has a few subcategories.

Once I set up the code, I inserted a few lines of javascript, and I was good to go. The first thing that struck me was that it took a few days for the contextual targeting to start. As I recall, Adsense was much quicker to show targeted ads. Once the targeted ads started to appear, I was a bit disappointed. Perhaps half of the ads were well targeted and the other half seemed like junk. I have been running the ads for a few weeks now, and while the targeting has improved slightly, it does not match the quality of Adsense’s targeting.

Unsatisfied with the contextual ads, I attempted to enter some content categories into the system to improve my site’s performance. None of the categories were a perfect match to my site, so I choose one that was the closest. While the category reduced my click through rate, my revenue per click nearly doubled. If your site is a good fit for one of the YPN content categories, I think that you could do very well with the program. I was also disappointed that YPN does not break out statistics by the ad category. Showing statistics by ad category and sub category would be a huge help in selecting the best categories for your site.

For one of my sites, the click through rate on my YPN ads was 68% lower than Adsense, and my CPM earnings were 42% lower than Adsense. Of course, your results may very. If you content fits one of the YPN content areas, I would spend some time testing the program to see if you can improve your earnings.