Yahoo News Posts Advertisements as News

An anonymous reader writes "Yahoo is now putting ad banners as news stories. This is highly misleading and is an awesome way to sell out." I don't really think Yahoo has been sold in in a few years, but this is a new level of yucky. No doubt it is a sign of things to come: the news is the ad. The ad is the news. It's one step worse then the bizarre advertising/news merge that was amazingly evident when Disney/ABC was doing with Monsters Inc while Time/Warner/AOL/CNN was hyping Harry Potter. Oh, in case they change it, basically they have a list of news stories, and one of them links simply to a page advertising (not surprisingly) X-10. The link isn't marked as an ad -- its simply one of the headlines in the news list. It's one thing to have more ads... it's another to simply disguise the ad as actual news. Update The ad was yanked. For those who missed it, there were a dozen news articles, but one was an advertisement. It was indistinguishable from the actual news.

Comments

Save your eyes!

[toupsie]

Don't gripe! No one has to view ad banners! With Squid Cache and Squid Guard running on your Linux/BSD/Mac OS X (where I use it) box, you never have to view ad banners again. In this case, all you have to add to your "Domain" list in Squid Guard (if you have it set up to block) is "us.a1.yimg.com" (without the quotes) and you will never know that Yahoo has banner ads. I replace all the banner ads with a 1x1 transparent gif.

Using this system also greatly speeds up my web access as I am no longer pulling tons of ads everyday.