Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

When Ads Go Wandering

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-catch-your-refridgerator dept.

conq writes "BusinessWeek explores yet another click fraud scam, this one utilizing Yahoo!'s ads." From the article: "Somewhere along the way, an ad can wander off this trail. This happens when one of Yahoo's partners decides to give its own partners a cut in return for traffic, Edelman says. According to the study, a Yahoo partner called Ditto.com served an Overture advertisement through another site, NBCSearch (no affiliation with General Electric's NBC), unaffiliated with Yahoo. That company, in turn, passed it along to one of its own partners. (NBCSearch didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.) When that happens, Yahoo can't track its ads. Sometimes, the ads show up in undesirable places, like a pop-up from a spyware program. The average user simply sees the pop-up, unaware of how many networks it traversed beforehand."

2 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. The biggest problem with click fraud... by Josh+teh+Jenius · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ...is that companies like Google and Yahoo! have refused to take it seriously.

    Many people, including myself, suggest that this is because these companies are earning big money off of those clicks, regardless of how they are obtained.

    As someone who was banned from Google's "magic money machine" without reason or cause, only to find a company unwilling to talk to you about it...it changes your opinion of things. That's all I can say.

    --
    Math is math. Regular expression is regular expression. The tools are there. The future is now.
  2. Yahoo click fraud -- big problem this week by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting
    My company (a top 500 website) saw click fraud through Yahoo that ate up all of our profit starting last Friday. On monday, Yahoo identified the fraudulent clicks (somehow) and revised our referrals and cost to where I would expect them to be.

    Today, Yahoo, revised our referral and cost numbers for the entire year. It turns out that we may have paid for about sixty-thousand dollars in fraudulent clicks in the past year.