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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.
Because, the worst I see is that damn X10 ad.
Has anyone else seen this? If not, I think that this AC readr should win Troll of the Year for 2002. Way to fool the editors...
I heard a rumor that X10 ads were actually CIA-sponsored spyware of some sort. I know that doesn't make sense, how could a "pop-under" actually contain spyware? Then I remembered that 90% or more of the web surfers use Internet Explorer - the X10 "pop-unders" probably have an ActiveX control in them. Remember NSA_KEY? It's not beyond MSFT to collaborate with the CIA. Also, the X10 ads seem to run in cycles - you get an X10 ad on just about every page load for a week or two, and then none for 6 months, and then they're back.