Yahoo Quality Based Pricing

10 Comments
By Zac Johnson on June 5th, 2007

I received an email from "Yahoo Publisher Network" with their announcement to start implementing "Quality Based Pricing". This looks to be their version of Google’s Smart Pricing. Below is the email sent out from Yahoo.

Introducing Quality-Based Pricing

Web publishing is a circular business. You produce a carefully crafted resource that’s useful and entertaining to your users. You offer contextual ads from a trusted source—that’s us—that strengthen your brand and message and, hopefully, bring you revenue from qualified clicks, which in turn can benefit the advertiser. That’s the formula, and we’ve always thought it a fair one.

In short, we like to think that we provide quality, for you as a publisher, for our advertisers and for the user. It’s a big circle of value. The circle can get warped, however, when users click on ads that don’t meet their needs, which can lead to poor conversions for advertisers.

Quality-Based Pricing
In our ongoing effort to strengthen our network, we’re introducing a new traffic quality feature called “quality-based pricing.” Under quality-based pricing, the traffic you drive to the advertiser will be priced commensurate with the value that advertisers receive.

It’s an important step that reinforces our overall commitment to deliver long-term success for our publishers, a high-quality experience for users, and high-value traffic to our advertisers.

This may have an impact on your business. When you provide quality traffic to our advertisers, this in turn may lead to better click revenue for you. Conversely, driving poor quality traffic to our advertisers may lead to reduced revenue.

So what is this new "Quality Based Pricing" and how will it affect Yahoo’s Publishers and Advertisers? As taken from Yahoo’s Quality Based Pricing FAQ:

What is quality-based pricing?

As part of the evolution of the Yahoo Search Marketing advertising system, we now include an assessment of the quality of our publisher’s traffic when you are charged for a click from that source. Depending on the quality of the traffic from the partner or publisher where the click came from, the cost of your click can be automatically discounted by a certain percentage.

Unfortunately, this likely means most publishers will see a decrease in the amount of earnings they earn per click. I have been a member of the Yahoo Publisher Network almost since it first went live. The earnings from the program during the end of 2005 were simply the most amazing payouts I have seen, and have made Yahoo my largest earning program to date. Over the past year, Yahoo Publisher’s have seen a dramatic decline in earnings and now it looks like we are possibly headed to even further declines. Nothing great lasts forever, but this can be compared to the same process we saw with Google Adsense when it first went live.

Posted in Affiliate Marketing

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Dexter said on June 5th, 2007 at 8:11 am

I have not tried the Yahoo publisher.. But does it work like adsense..
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Zac Johnson said on June 5th, 2007 at 8:15 am

Same concept as Google Adsense, but with more higher paying offers… but let targeted.
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Dexter said on June 5th, 2007 at 8:18 am

But why you are not using it here.. Is there any reason.. You have told that you have been blogging for 10 year.. You must ahave lot’s of experience as a problogger.
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Zac Johnson said on June 5th, 2007 at 8:57 am

For now I have decided not to blast ads all over the site, like most other blogs. As more posts are being written, it is making more sense to add YPN or Google, as it will match up with content.
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Amit said on June 5th, 2007 at 9:46 am

I think yahoo still isn’t accepting small publishers. I have never seen YPN ads on any indian site. Maybe india is ’small’ for them?
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Zac Johnson said on June 5th, 2007 at 10:03 am

I know it’s still definitely limited to US only.
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Wolf Stone said on June 5th, 2007 at 9:49 pm

Limited to U.S. only huh..should i even bother finding out if it is avaliable to Canadians?
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Zac Johnson said on June 6th, 2007 at 7:00 am

US Only.
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KC TAN said on June 6th, 2007 at 10:03 am

There are rumors that YPN is going to go international soon but I heard that since last year..

By the way, I have received an email from Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) regarding this matter also =)
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CPA Affiliates said on June 6th, 2007 at 12:05 pm

Its Yahoos version of smart pricing will be interesting to see how it plays out.
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