Up until a couple of months ago when the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) was launched in its beta form, Google Adsense had a clear monopoly on the PPC advertising industry. Though many webmasters did not agree with some of the Adsense policies, there was no alternatives, that was until Yahoo released YPN. Now with the beta form being out for a few months, the question ultimately comes down to: which program earns its publishers the most revenue?

While YPN is still in its beta stage, the one thing Adsense still has going for it, is its support of international publishers. YPN on the other hand, is on an invite only basis for publishers within the United States. There is no doubt that YPN will eventually open its doors for international publishers, but until then they are still stuck with Adsense. Google also seems to have an advantage in some of the features found in Adsense, including image ads, ad links, Adsense for Search, and referrals. YPN is still in its beta form, yet it does seem currently that Google is targeting more of a variety in ad formats, whereas Yahoo would prefer to stay text based. The one area where Yahoo has beat Google to is the use of ads within RSS feeds. Google does support this in a beta form, yet Yahoo already has this feature completed, with integration into WordPress and Movable Type. Based on features alone, the advantage has to be given to Adsense.

Despite the number, or quality of the features of either program, many publishers are more concerned with the relevancy of the ads to their site, and how quickly the relevant ads will appear. With Google Adsense, Public Service Ads (PSA's), are displayed on a page until the Google spider has time to visit the website, and determine the context. While PSA's do not generate any income for clicks, or impressions, they do generally disappear fairly quickly. With YPN on the other hand, the initial ad units are filled with run of the network (RON) ads, which pay a fairly high CPC, and are untargeted, yet they have the capability of earning you money from the second you put the ads on the site. So far within the beta testing it does seem like the YPN spider is slower to visit your site, but this speed will most likely increase as the program comes out of beta, and is released to the public. Overall, the advantage in relevancy still has to remain with Adsense.

Since ad relevancy is such a major issue to many publishers, both programs have taken two different approaches at allowing a publisher to optimize their site towards a specific category of ads. For example, a publisher of a sports website, would most likely like to have sports related ads upon their website. With Adsense, they are able to place html code signaling, "the good content", in which they want the spider to generate the ads from. This feature has been around for quite awhile with Google, yet it is not very publicized, and has produced moderate results at best for most publishers. This same publisher with YPN, has a more general way of targeting, in which they have the capability of choosing one of 132 sub-categories for their site. In the example, the publisher may choose Recreation & Sports as a category and then have the system serve up related ads on their site. While this sounds great in theory, the results do not always show with many publishers, who are often better off just letting YPN choosing the category of the site in its spidering. Though neither program has come close to perfecting user ad targeting, so far YPN has the advantage, as they have a good system set up to handle it, but just need to add some more specific categories.

Much of the complaints about Google Adsense were related to their so called "unfair" banning of many publishers for click fraud, which to them can mean anything from clicking on your own ad unit, to spamming, to almost anything that violating the program's terms of service. While Google simply bans publishers who violate the TOS often enough, YPN has taken a very different stance at this issue. If by chance a publisher does click on their own ad unit, Yahoo simply does not count the click, and for all practical purposes ignores the infraction. Now granted, they may take a different stance in the future if clicking on your own ads becomes a repetitive event, but in the current beta test it has been just ignored, to many publishers' delight.

The question is really whether or not Yahoo will be able to maintain this policy once it opens up to the public. Click fraud is a major issue on the web today, and such a lenient policy would lend itself to people testing the limits of their leniency. From what we've seen in the beta test, the advantage is leaning towards YPN on the issue of click fraud, but a lot of this depends on how this policy is changed when it is released to the public.

Now, the question you have been waiting for: Will Adsense or YPN generate more revenue for your website? The answer is it depends. A lot of publishers have reported increases in revenue while switching to YPN, while an equal number have reported decreases in revenue. What has been agreed on however, is the fact that while YPN will have a much lower CTR (Click Through Ratio) than Adsense, it will also pay significantly higher for each click. Most publishers switching to YPN, report anywhere from 1/8 to 1/2 of their CTR with Adsense, yet also 1.5 to 8 times larger EPC. The question of which program will make more money for your website, really goes back to the question of relevancy. Every click in YPN is equal to approximately 1.5-8 clicks in Adsense in terms of monetary value, so if the ads on your website for YPN are relevant, than that could lead towards big earnings.

Likewise, if they are totally untargeted, you may only get one click per day, which is less than the 10-12 you may have gotten in Adsense. The only way to find out for sure, is to test out each program within your website, use channels to track the statistics, and after a good testing period of a few months, see which program earned you more money.

Tom Mar is the owner of retsambew dash klat for charity, an entry into the Webmaster-Talk SEO contest for the keywords retsambew dash klat for charity.