Yahoo Publisher Network: A One-Way Street?

Some great posts around the web following up on Yahoo's decision to extend their content matching ad program to smaller publishers, a la Google AdSense. But few analysts appear to be looking at this from the advertiser's point of view. As things stand, content match option on Yahoo has the dubious honor of being "even worse than Google AdWords content targeting". If it continues to operate in its present fashion, it'll just be helping even more dubious publishers cash in on a few ignorant advertisers who don't track. Even if 75% of advertisers know what they're doing, the remaining 25% are still very good at over-rewarding weak publishers with wildly overpriced clicks. Many times, I've heard advertisers tell me they've shut their entire Yahoo campaign down because it just ran out of gas, and was too difficult to manage. They usually say they'll try to get it back up when they have more time. The problem lies squarely at the product level. The YSM interface is just too inflexible and too unusable from an advertiser standpoint, as this recent Andrew Goodman is Principal of Traffick.com, an acclaimed "guide to portals" which foresaw the rise of trends such as paid search and semantic analysis.