If you participate in the Yahoo Publisher Network you would have received an email a week or so ago advising you to expect new pricing adjustments based on Yahoo’s assessment of the quality of traffic coming from your site. According to TechCrunch the upshot of this is likely to be lower payments for most publishers.

Yahoo introduced the change on September 9, advising publishers that it had:

“upgraded the quality-based pricing system which adjusts advertiser click charges based on our assessment of the quality of traffic coming from sources within our distribution network. The new version of quality-based pricing may result in discounts being applied across more keywords, and/or deeper discounts for lower-quality traffic. Additionally, for the first time, it may also result in a pricing premium for higher-quality traffic. This enhancement will affect our Sponsored Search and Domain Match traffic only.”

Thanks for letting us know, but as TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington points out, publishers are none the wiser as to how they can improve the quality of their traffic. Especially as Yahoo’s system determines which ads run on which sites!

I guess it’s a sign of the times – the economic downturn has certainly reduced publishers’ bargaining power – but with so many advertising networks around (not to mention Google) can Yahoo afford to take such a stance?

Source: Michael Arrington, “Yahoo Expands Quality Based Pricing. Translation: Publishers Get Less,” TechCrunch, September 11, 2009

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under News and Comment, Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.