AdSense versus Yahoo Publisher Network
The Yahoo Publisher Network came storming out of their corner, fists swinging with promises to rival AdSense, but so far it hasn't managed to land any major blows. YPN is still in Beta, and still only supports USA traffic--very light weight for the contextual network backed by the giant Yahoo.
Even so, there are a lot of publishers in the beta network (myself included), and I've seen the question posed many times: Who is better, AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network?
I know this may seem like a dodge, but the answer is... it depends.
It has been my experience, and that of many other publishers from what I read on the forums, that YPN pays much more per click, as a rule. But don't get too excited just yet. Their targetting is much worse, so the click through rate is generally far less than with AdSense. Yes they usually pay more per click (sometimes 5 times more), but with a 0.5% CTR that doesn't really pay the bills.
There have been reports of a few webmasters who are just thrilled with YPN, since they happen to have sites on the topics that YPN actually has good ad inventory for. Unfortunately for them, as soon as YPN goes out of beta and everyone can be a publisher, their EPC is only going to go down. Right now it's a seller's market, but when everybody can publisher, the market will swing more in favor of the buyers, the advertisers.
So the best thing I can recommend is to give YPN a try if you can get into the beta network, and test out your pages to see which ones work better with YPN--if your time isn't more valuable than any slight gains you might get from a few pages.
I'm afraid for now AdSense remains the heavyweight champion, and YPN is still in the lockerroom trying to figure out how to ties its shoes.
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