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Yahoo Sued for Spyware, Typosquatting-Based Ads
An anonymous reader writes to mention a Yahoo! suit involving allegations of spyware and typosquatting-based ads. From the article: "The suit claims that Yahoo displayed these advertisers' online ads via spyware and adware products and on so-called 'typosquatter' Web sites that capitalize on misspellings of popular trademarks or company names. Potentially more explosive is the plaintiff's claim that Yahoo regularly uses its relationship with adware and typosquatting sites to gin up extra revenue around earnings time, alleging that the company is conspiring to boost revenue by partnering with some of the Internet's seamier characters."
Of course, I quit using Yahoo when I started using only Google. Yahoo's website went from being the cleanest and least laden with trickery and pervasive ads to one of the worst.
Google ads at least are text and off to the side. Whether or not they are promoting typosquatting or not they are easy to ignore.
Corporatism != Free Market
Ben Edelman has a breakdown on how Yahoo fund spyware
this is just the tip of the iceberg, Google, Ask Jeeves, MySpace, MyWay,iWon, the list of million dollar companies built from and profiting from these seedy practices goes on, its about time somebody gets the smackdown either in court or via other methods
This apparently isn't about consumers: the plaintiffs are a bunch of pissed off advertisers, who would prefer to interfere with your search results rather than with some parked and forgotten domain. The plaintiffs also refuse to name themselves and use terms like "improper advertising displays" (like advertising speech could somehow be "improper".)
They do have a point. Do you want me to tell you why?
.com or .whatever in their name? Why not filter these searches out?
Lots and lots of typosquatters use Overture's Keyword Selector tool to find the juiciest domains. Try it yourself, try searching for "fool.com" without the quotes, and you'll be able to see the number of people who searched for that domain using one of Yahoo's search bars. This gives you a hint that there are many people who would be typing that domain in the address bar, so if nobody registered it, then the typosquatter goes ahead and registers the domain to make lots and lots of money from ADs.
Now, please remind me, why on earth would Yahoo leave the opportunity to search for keywords that have
It's still better than T.V. advertising, or national newspaper advertising.
You are only paying for people who followed the link
not for people who have just seen it.
Newspaper advertising cost is based on circulation
T.V. on expected audience figures.
roughly.
Follow these directions should you be afflicted with the Yahoo! Toolbar.
That toolbar is probably the portal for this Spyware and crap. You know, it comes with applications and installs itself (seemingly) sometimes. I've had to remove it countless times, the battle rages on.
Or you can just switch to Firefox. A new version is out, now's as good a time as ever!
My work here is dung.
Raise AdBlock, Mr. Worf. Continual fire, all bannings.
Just out of curiosity, how did you measure "sales per click"? I'm assuming that you measure the number of sales you got received from people who clicked the ad and then bought your product during that session, but how do you know there weren't others who clicked your ad, saw your product, then decided to come back later directly through your URL to buy the product? Seems kind of difficult to sort out I would imagine. Of course a lot of the clicks may be fradulent, but meausring the success of your ad by the number of people who buy right away after clicking the ad seems to be a poor measure of cuccess.
Monstar L
i agree, i never buy stuff on the first impression.
;)
usually when i see something cool, i bookmark the site, look around, and after i'm convinced that it was the best offer i go back and buy the stuff. now the bookmark made has no idea that i came from google originally.
but if it's really the case that you only made 1 sale after advertising stuff on google, i doubt that your product is any good
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
People need to get over the fact the internet is brought to you by companies who are paying huge sums of cash to put their product in front of you and they will find any and every way to get you to see them. This is the big lie. Take a look at a decent history of the Internet, and you'll see that Internet is NOT "brought to you by companies paying huge sums of money to put their product in front of you.." Those companies saw a tool for satisfying their rapacious greed using a publicly funded utility and have since been trying to turn that utility into their own private playground. And they'll probably succeed, since our public officials are almost all whores. We'll remember a brief, shining moment when some kid with a computer and list of html codes could get a message out to hundreds of millions of people. We'll remember a day when an outfit like slashdot could have an idea and be on an even playing field with Microsoft and Sony (at least in the arena of online media). We've got at most another 2 years of a free and open internet before it becomes little more than another television. There might still be some sort of third-tier "public-access" internet, but it'll be slower, harder to get and less powerful. And we'll probably only get that as part of a bigger package, including the new "AT&T brings you the Internet!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Everyone who is ready to flame Yahoo's "evil" practices should realize that Google does profits from typosquatting too, with their DomainPark service. How many legitimate websites are there that get more than 750,000 page views a month and are just "parked"? Yahoo may be doing something evil, but "do no evil" Google isn't innocent either.
Honestly, this article is like the light that's been shining in our eyes for so long we didn't care anymore. I stopped using Yahoo when it installed a toolbar in my IE(I know, I'm all Firefox now)and began not just pumping, but flooding my PC like N.O. with spyware. Yahoo's a long standing company, and in being long standing, they start getting the shady people inside their ranks, and eventually one of them gets high enough to implement an idea like this. Sadly, this is Capitolism. The Company that can profit the most does the best. If Yahoo is in with typosquatters, so be it! That's their business practice and I didn't find much about it being illegal, just not nice. So while Yahoo didn't break any rules, it only re-enforced the belief of this non-net-savvy person that I should use Google from now on. And didn't Yahoo start this when they had the Full Page Flash Overlay ads?
" i r 1337. j00 a l0z3r "
That talk kinda makes you cry, doesn't it?
That's right..cry those nerdly tears
de-selecting the yahoo tools option in the install has no effect!
(FYI DLing the 56k version of the reader seems to cut out most of the bloat)
"People need to get over the fact the internet is brought to you by companies who are paying huge sums of cash to put their product in front of you and they will find any and every way to get you to see them."
No, internet was brought on as a collbration tool used by universities. If all the big companies disappear off the face of internet, most of the sites that were built by users as a hobby or to share information with the world would still be there and internet would still be 'good' and probably 'a better thing'
Just because they follow the ad, and then decide that they don' want to be there, doesn't mean it's a fraudulent click. Maybe they took 1 look at your website, and decided that they didn't like it. Remember that article about how it only takes .5 seconds for someone to make a judgement of your site? There's lots of times when I'll click on an ad, and then leave the site right away because it wasn't really what I was looking for.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's your job to make the sale, NOT Google's. If your clicks per sale ratio is poor then you have a problem.
Google got them to your page (ie. they made the lead)... it was up to you to actually make the sale (convert the lead)... perhaps you should examine your own site first? it might be confusing and difficult to actually find what they were looking for or your prices were crap compared to other sites or something else may have turned them right off buying from you...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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