The office is buzzing with the NBA finals - I decided to check back on my favorite (decreasing) sports site at Sports.Yahoo.com for the latest news. The other day, a co-worker told me he managed to sell 2 of his tickets for over $1,000 each. As if that’s not enough, I heard on the radio that a court-side ticket was selling for $112,000! Sounds like a big money making opportunity to me for contextual advertisers - but apparently Yahoo! doesn’t seem to think so.
Bless his soul, Johnny Ludden, who covered the story on Laker’s win on the Celtics last night. Here’s his picture. Nice chap - haven’t worked with him while I was at Yahoo! last year - but I’m sure he’s a cool d00d.
So Johnny probably spent a good amount of time covering this and I’m sure Yahoo! paid a pretty penny to get this content drafted, reviewed, edited, reviewed, written and published. And their plan is to sell ads against content like these. Perfect idea!
But throwing good content like that away to the dogs is not the way to go Yahoo!.
How contextually relevant are DUI ads to the quality content on NBA finals? This will seem like a no-brainer to many webmasters out there who are generating money from contextual ads.
Bless their heart - I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with their Sports Team over at Yahoo! in Santa Monica. They are the victims of a poorly designed contextual algorithm that is delivering these non-targeted ads to the content pages. Mind you, the clicks still generate money for Yahoo!, but do you think they advertisers are actually happy with the results?
I know NBA players have a tendency to drink and fans even more - but wouldn’t it be presumptuous to think your readers need a DUI lawyer during this NBA finals? 
Also, wouldn’t Yahoo! make more money if they were serving more relevant ads? One could argue that the issue is inventory - so maybe that’s why they need the partnership with Adsense as well?
Please fix your ad serving platform - at least for your customers’ experience sake.
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