A post on SEORoundtable.com reports that:

Some Yahoo! Publishers in the YPN program are receiving warning emails from Yahoo! that they can not run other contextual ad programs with YPN. The only thing is, these publishers are running AdBright in conjunction with YPN. And we all know AdBright is not contextually driven.

So, it sounds first like YPN is making a mistake emailing publishers who aren’t actually running a competing contextual product since Adbrite is not contextual.

However, it brings up a greater issue. Google’s Adsense program has always had the policy of not having Adsense ads on the same page as any competing network’s contextual ads.

Why do they make this a walled garden? I can understand at a basic level that they are simply trying to limit competition, but this hurts publishers. They either are limited to one contextual network, or they need to program a system or configure their ad server to rotate ads in a way which won’t put two competing network’s ads on the page at the same time.

What are they afraid of? You don’t see Right Media, Fastclick, Tribal Fusion, and other display networks telling people they can’t run a competing display ad network’s ads.

Are they afraid they can’t compete with their competitors? Publishers are going to use the networks that make them the most money, and so it’s possible that this policy can end up hurting Google and YPN because if a publisher prefers one of them over the other, instead of getting some inventory to prove themselves worthy, the publisher will just drop them.

I know plenty of publishers who won’t go through the trouble of running both of them, so they’ll just run one. Do you really win?

It seems like YPN is missing an opportunity here to make Google look like the one who’s scared.