Yahoo Publisher Network : Woefully Bereft of Relevance
That means it sucks.
This summer I wrote about David Swensen's book, Unconventional Success. The book is about asset allocation, investing, stocks, bonds & mutual funds. The ads that I attracted to that posting was in the order of "Dating Large Women" and "Oversize Dating". My partners had a nice laugh at that. Maybe it was the words "alternative assets" or "real estate" that caused the problem. Who knows?
One of my recent articles, Pitching to VCs is attracting ads of the same caliber. The post is about how to build an effective pitch to VCs, and it's attracted these kinds of ads: "Black Dating Online", "LDS Dating Online" (that's latter day saints), "Senior Friend Finder - 40 an over" (by the way, that's got to be a great service to some). See it yourself here.
What have I done to deseve this? Is Yahoo trying to tell me that whoever reads my blog is hopeless in the dating scene. I will buy a cup of coffee to the best guess as to what in that text may have caused these ads to show.
I tried to see the same page (Pitching to VCs, great article by the way) with Google Ads, but the results were still terrible:
* We Need Writers
* Baby Pictures contest
* Cute baby picture contest
* Celebrity Baby Quiz
* Photo Contests - $10,000
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | November 10, 2006 at 12:14 AM
The article is all about a dating site scenario.. There are sentences like: "I am thinking of a fictitious, online ***dating*** startup who is fundraising."
And also, words like ***missing***, ***touches*** can trigger these ads. Although you mean completely different.
After all, dating bids are much more competitive than VC bids, so even if the context has a little connection with dating, dating ads are triggered...
Do I deserve a cup of coffee :)
Posted by: Emre Sokullu | November 10, 2006 at 12:44 AM
Of course, what was I thinking. I do say "dating site" don't I? YOu are the contender to win, but give others time :-)
Posted by: Baris Karadogan | November 10, 2006 at 06:31 AM
I owe Yahoo an apology. The service is not as bad as I make it. At least now, it's showing me decent ads.
Posted by: Baris Karadogan | November 13, 2006 at 06:46 PM
Here's what you should not have written: "How big is it?"
Posted by: Onder Batur | November 26, 2006 at 11:04 PM