This morning I was looking at the ads YPN was showing on my newly launched PHP blog and was wondering how “free calls” and Vonage had anything to do with this post which is filled with programming references and code. The whole page and blog is about PHP programming so what does that have to do with Vonage? Why was the Yahoo Publishing Network (YPN) showing Vonage and Cheap Calls: USA to Guyana. Or the Florist.com ad for that matter. Maybe it’s send flowers to your favorite programmer day.

And then it hit me and I went doh! The word “hello” was being used. Hello by itself was a keyword that these advertisers were targeting. But hello is a tricky word to target because when you have “hello world” you are almost always looking at programming-related content. After all, that’s usually the first example for a programming language.

I decided to dial up the YPN rep and tell them about the situation and see what they had to say. It’s a beta program, so I figured they’d appreciate examples of sites and targeting that was haywire. I was curious what their response would be too.

Compare YPN to MakeYouGoHmm and Google Adsense where yesterday I wrote about the video game Nintendogs and how the dogs don’t seem to poop and Google decided to show ads for “Pooper Trooper of Seattle,” “Dog Poop cleanup bag sale” and so on. Those contextual ads made me laugh. I’d say they were more relevant to the post than Vonage is to hello world PHP coding examples.

This just goes to show how tough it is coming up with contextual advertising that is really complimentary and useful to the content being displayed on the page.

The YPN advisor I spoke to was very nice and seemed to take the information with interest. I wasn’t complaining, just passing along the information. I noticed the ads getting more relevant as the conversation went along and I refreshed the page (no, I never clicked any of the ads, BTW, that would be a violation of the terms. I just refreshed the pages they were showing on). Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the Google adsense program?

I’ve read other webmasters say the ads were on par with Google contextually but so far in the two cases I’ve experimented Google is producing more relevant ads.

• Google Adsense adds new ad formats and language support
• How to Hello World in 170+ languages
• Google Adsense adds image option
• Google Adsense offers alternate ads
• Should Google worry about Yahoo entering contextual search?
• Regnow adds tabled text ads via SoftwareAdsNow