This is a pretty hot topic these days amongst the beta YPN publishers as YPN has been sending out numerous emails asking publishers to either remove or rework their ad placements, especially those with images nearby that might qualify as “click incentives”. I have been in close contact with my account manager, Eva, and at the same time I have been researching to find out exactly what the happy medium is here. It appears to me that the key ingredient is to not use images as click incentives in any way, shape, or form. To define what exactly that means on a level of specifics is going to be a bit more difficult, but I will outline what I “feel” is right within this blog post. Please note that my views and opinions are just that, my views and opinions.
First of all, if you plan to put images anywhere next to your ads; whether on top, to the right of, to the left of, or beneath the ad unit, you need to make sure the images relate to your site’s content. If you have a site about books, you don’t want images of luxury cars next to the YPN ad unit. Secondly, it seems YPN is very concerned that the closer the images are to the ad unit the more of a “click incentive” it becomes. This is an easy problem to solve for the publisher, as it is quite simple to move the images over a bit. I even went as far on one of my high trafficked sites to move the images over some and put a thin vertical line between the images and the ad unit. This made YPN happy (which makes me happy) and my CTR was NOT affected. Finally, I must say that I appreciate what YPN is doing here. They are in their beta program and wanting to find ways to please both the advertisers and the publishers. It would have been very easy for them to throw up a blanket statement in the ToS stating that there can be no images of any kind anywhere near a YPN ad unit. The fact that they are open to this and understand the publisher side of the equation is great. I look forward to seeing how YPN continues to make progress with the beta program!
They seem to have a much tougher stance than Adsense concering this
Continue following their blog and what their bigger publishers are doing. It can be done and well within their guidelines.