I was contacted multiple times by John Steinberg, Head Of Strategic Partnerships to sign up with Yavli, their advertising platform despite not knowing him and having my out of office e-mail reply on. He kept badgering me to sign up, completely ignoring my request to be left alone. He was rude, clueless about the business, and didn’t care what I wrote, so long as he could get his message across.

DO NOT sign up with Yavli. They only care about their own profits and do not care about the publisher. If they did, they’d listen.

Examples Of Why Using Yavli Is A Waste Of Time

1) They spam you with an e-mail heading that says, “Your Ads Are Not Working!” to try to get you to click and fear that you’re missing out. Playing along with John’s click bait title, I asked him t0 clarify what he means since my ads are working.  He responds,

“Your ads aren’t working because ad blockers are stopping them from loading. We have a solution which can circumvent this and our ad network should make you between $650/1000 per month.Would you like to try?”

If my site started making $650/$1,000 per month, I would actually lose 95% of my revenue. So I ask John to explain to me the RPM.

2) They have no idea about wha the proper advertising rates are. John said he has no idea what I’m currently earning, but then he revealed the average CPM rate is $3. $3 CPM is no different than what you can get on Google Adsense if you are in the personal finance space. But the reality is, CPM rates are $10 – $40 in the personal finance space. Therefore, their rates are ridiculously low.

3) They don’t bother to listen. I was trying to give John the benefit of the doubt for being clueless about the attractiveness of his CPM, so I asked him to read this post on Blogging For A Living and let me know his thoughts. He proceeded to ignore my request, and when I followed up, he had no idea what post I was talking about even though the link was right in the e-mail chain!

This shows he is completely clueless about developing a relationship with a publisher. He didn’t bother to read the post and he didn’t even see the post link in the e-mail chain when I asked him to check again! All he cared about was trying to get me to try the Yavli platform. Why the hell would I do that when he hasn’t even read any of my posts, or bothered to read the post I asked him to read?

His response, “What ones are you referring too? Also can we trial our solution on your site?”

4) Still doesn’t bother to listen. So I ask, “Where was the misunderstanding when you didn’t understand what I was talking about when I included the post? Why didn’t you read the post? Or are you just concerned about selling it and not connecting?”

John’s response, “Do you want to try our ad blocker solution?”

Maybe they are using a ROBOT?

So I try again, “Does my out of office email not work? Or are you just choosing to ignore it?”

John the robot responds, “It doesn’t work because if you were out of the office you wouldn’t be emailing me.”

Pretty smart for a robot actually!

Yavli Is A Waste Of Time

If Yavli has John as The Head Of Partnerships, then signing up with them is a complete waste of time. I’ve got the entire e-mail chain archived and it is absolutely hilarious. Instead of signing up for this ad networks that claim to show your ads in a growing ad blocking world, work on building your affiliate partnerships instead because they are unblockable.

For example, the Personal Capital affiliate program is one of the best out there because the product is free and ads huge value. There are so many more to look for that are synergistic to your content.

Regards,

Sam