Adsense was the first, and with the addition of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and the promised MSN adCenter, website owners and marketers can now choose between several advertising barons to make their money. Its still up in the air as to which one will be the best however, it is clear that ‘the best’ will be the one that makes people, both advertisers and content owners, the most money. The one that makes the most money for everyone will be the most efficient — only showing ads that are trluy relavant to the content of the page they appear on and making sure that the content owners are not cheating or abusing the advertisers (and vice versa). I’m not aware of advertisers screwing over content oweners, but I sure am aware of the opposite!
Take a look at the ad above (click for full resolution). Do you see anything? The image is a screen grab of an ad from an active webpage. In order to provide the best service, it is incumbent upon YPN, Adsense, and adCenter to weed out the publishers who are stealing from us all by devaluing online marketing through various tricks (such as low contrasting colours shown in the ad above and the tower below).
Since Google has a method of reporting bad guys, I thought the Yahoo! Publisher Network (YPN) would have one too. I was wrong. So I started asking some questions to the public face of the YPN, the YPN Blog. There is no contact form and no email address supplied for contacting any of the members of the YPN blog. There is a Feedback link (it currently broken as it takes you to a YPN feedburner page…?), which I used (when it was working) to ask the following question:
How does a member of the public alert YPN to TOS abuses by a YPN member?
Over the course of a few emails from various Yahoo! employee’s I was told that Yahoo! is working on, “a really good solution.” You can read the series of messages that lead to really good solution comment, but I’ve just told you the coles notes version. Yahoo! is working on it.
The remainder of this post highlights the reasons why this is a big problem and shows a few examples. This is followed by the communications I have had with the YPN team about the issue and how members of the public can report abusers and cheaters, and some concluding thoughts. Jump to the end?
On June 14, the YPN blog published a story entitled: Now That’s Progress. While it provides many updates and feature enhancements / additions for publishers and marketers using YPN, it does nothing to solve what I perceive to be the biggest and most important problem: abusive publishers.
Maybe some of you noticed because I asked you to look at the ad shown at the top of this post, but if it was on a page alone would you recognize it as an advertisement that has been modified (against YPN’s TOS) and not part of the websites regular content? Take a look at the same ad, only this one has been photoshopped on the right side to reveal the yellow text underneath each ‘paragraph’ (in pink).
This image illustrates how some websites try to trick web surfers into clicking on ads, a practice which is against the Terms of Service of every advertising network. Can you see the ‘Ads by Yahoo!’ text on the tower ad below? Coincidently, the tower ad appears exactly like the navigational links this website uses in the hopes that people accidentally click on the ad and give the website owner some money.
When content creators and website owners manipulate the advertising on the webpages they run with the intention of tricking users into clicking on them, everyone loses. Let me explain who loses and why:
Advertisers: YPN or Adsense charges the advertiser for a successful ad placement whenever an ad is clicked. Because the colours of the webpage were manipulated, advertisers are charged every time someone mistakes a YPN or Adsense ad for legitimate web content.
Web Surfers: As soon as they discover they have been duped into going to a new website, they often close the window (tab) and or go back, and start a new search for whatever it is they were looking for. A waste of time.
Publishers: Other individuals tricking people into clicking and thereby making advertisers lose money not only discourages advertisers from doing online marketing, but also reduces the value of online marketing. This results in lower and lower prices for publishers because the actual value of online advertising slowly decreases. How do advertisers know the difference between good and bad marketing? As a publisher, you lose because others make the value of your service (providing content on which to advertise) decrease.
The middlemen (Yahoo / Google): As everyone loses confidence in the system, the system begins to break down. If advertisers can’t trust their online marketing campaigns as run using the middleman’s tools, then they’ll stop using them or pay less. This means less profit and tighter bottom lines.
What is surprising is that only Adsense provides some kind of mechanism for the causal web surfer or publisher to give feedback and report pages that abuse and trick.
Reporting offenders to the Adsense team is the subject of the next post, but for now consider the following communications between me and members of the YPN Blog. Again, I used their feedback form to post the following question:
How does a member of the public alert YPN to TOS abuses by a YPN member?
I received a pleasant reply from one Jeff Hecox
From: Jeff Hecox
Sent: May 16, 2006 12:36 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: Your mailYou should Contact Customer Solutions to report TOS violators:
https://publisher.yahoo.com/help/support.php
Cheers!
M2
My reply:
Hi Jeff,
Thanks for getting back to me — I really appreciate it. However, the link you suggest below brings me to a login screen for the Yahoo Publisher Network and requires a ‘Yahoo! Business ID’. I don’t have a Yahoo ID because I don’t happen to use the YPN. Is there a way to report TOS to Customer Solutions that doesn’t require a login?
Thanks for your time,
Kirk
Jeff’s Reply:
From: Jeff Hecox
Sent: May 16, 2006 1:01 PM
To: Kirk
Subject: RE: Reporting YPN TOS abuse (Your mail)I see. That is an issue. I assumed you were a publisher in our network.
I’l look into this and get back to you.
Cheers!
M2
I replied…
Hi Jeff,
Its been awhile and I wanted to know if you had found out any more info on reporting TOS violations to the Yahoo Publisher Network. I don’t mean to bug you, so if there is a more appropriate contact at Yahoo for this question I’d be happy to ask him or her.
Cheers,
Kirk
I didn’t hear back from Jeff for quite awhile (2 weeks?), so I emailed Jeremy Zawodny because he seemed to have an active blog and his title ‘Yahoo! Troublemaker’ seemed inline with my question:
Hi Jeremy,
As the official Yahoo! Troublemaker, I hope you can answer a question for me. Here is the set up: a random internet user is browsing the web and finds a webpage that has YPN ads on it. The page is using some methods that violate the YPN terms of service (e.g. pop unders).
The question: how does a member of the public alert YPN to TOS abuses by a YPN member? I am aware that a fellow YPN member can use this page, https://publisher.yahoo.com/help/support.php, to alert YPN, but how can a non YPN member do it?
Thanks for your time,
Kirk
I got a response from him the next day:
I really don’t know. But I’ll find out for you.
I haven’t heard from Jeremy yet (its been two weeks). However, I did get a reply from Jeff Hecox a week later on June 06, 2006:
No prob Kirk. This is an issue we’re working on getting a really good solution for. We don’t want to do anything halfway, but we’re working on it and we’ll get something to you soon!M2
Conclusions
And that is where the situation stands. Yahoo! has said they are doing something. Are they? ‘Only time will tell.’ In the meantime there are some people who are getting really mad at Yahoo! for not having a method to combat this problem (unlike Google’s Adsense).
Consider the comments by Ben_ on this post at the YPN blog. Ben_’s site, www.moddedup.com features his rants about the contextual advertising racket. Its an interesting read, I don’t agree with the tone of his message (personally, I would be a bit more professional [but thats just me]) nor always his point of view, but I do like people who get results. The advertisements I used as examples above come from websites Ben_ has pointed out to Yahoo!. Recently, the site in question seems to have stopped using Yahoo! ads…. is this because Ben_ has been complaining? Who knows.
If the only way to stop the cheaters is to loudly and bitterly rail against Yahoo! and the system, well then I am all for it. Note to Yahoo!: common sense dictates that if more people start acting like Ben_, your public relations department is going to have a harder and harder time marketing the YPN service.
22 Jun 06
3:39 am
I agree there needs to be a way to contact them about TOS violators and for the time being I would suggest keeping a collaborative list of such sites that you find. I’m sure you could think up fun uses for that list.
However, I don’t see this as the only problem with these advertising services. I see sneaky stuff going on using Adsense all the time even on very popular blogs. I don’t have the time nor the will to memorize the TOS for all this sort of stuff so I honestly don’t know that while it’s shady it’s actually violating TOS or not.
How easy is it to fill out a complaint? If it’s not that hard I may just invest in a program like Roboform AI or even more complex macro proggie/languate to fill out most of the important stuff for me. Otherwise, I’ve pretty much given up. I’m just too fed up with all this advertising BS.
I am fairly certain it will reach all new levels of insanity when MS formally opens up for business. “Here’s our OS you’re already dependent on, here’s our new browser that’s a million times better than the old one, here’s our call-home Genuine Advantage plan for YOUR safety, here’s our free Windows LIVE online serrvice, and here’s our new advertising dept. that we’ll try really hard not to leverage any of the previously mentioned items for in order to gain an advantage.” Hrm.
For a while now I’ve been collecting screenshots of sneaky practices as well as ‘contextual’ ads that are ridiculously out of context but fairly common. I don’t know if I’ll bother to even attempting to post that stuff anymore.
I’m starting to see more and more that the way things are shaping up sooner or later all these advertisers and affiliates playing with monopoly money and not providing enough real service for the advertising prices they charge… it’s all going to cave in. So why bother being a watchdog when the situation is bound to right itself naturally over time?
Yes, that’s hypocritical coming from me and the things I write in my blog but I intend to change the model of it very shortly. My hypocrisy has finally reached its limits I believe.
Jā
24 Jun 06
8:22 pm
Please do something about the 5 places you’ve used the word “loose” when you meant “lose”. It nearly drove me insane!!! Other than that, great article.
24 Jun 06
9:00 pm
Anon,
Thanks for stopping by. I had no idea I was such a loose loser. All is better, I have been enlightened. As an aside, your comment reminded me of the main character in ‘confederacy of dunces’, has your valve closed?
Cheers, and thanks.
29 Jun 06
8:01 am
If the company itself has no real interest in the so called cheaters, why are you so intent on making the charge against them?
I see all advertising as a bane. Bandwidth hogs. Worthless waste of time cluttering up my screen, sort of crap.
I have never clicked an ad and I never will.
Yahoo could put a thousand a day in my face and I doubt I’d even notice as I have learned to filter them out completely.
I pay my provider for internet access. I pay for a usenet service. I pay for mail access. I’m not going to pay someone else just for the [so called] priviledge of seeing advertising based content.
I use several very effective programs that block almost all advertising. Sites that require me to lower certain protections in order to access them get black listed. Content is easily found elsewhere on non-advertising glutted sites.
I looked at your two examples and still don’t see what the issue is. One has a link in pink at the bottom. So if you remove the pink you’re cheating? You’re assuming that users actually click the links, ever.
Most, if not all, of the people I know have learned to completely ignore internet advertising. We don’t even see it any more.
I guess they can always count on the stupid people. Gods knows there are plenty of them.
29 Jun 06
8:55 am
While I agree with you on many points, you never actually rebut mine. You come at this problem from a web surfers perspective. By using Filterset.G and adblock, most of if not all ads are never shown in your browser. I have no problem with this.
My perspective is from a website operator. Here on maxpower I never have more than 1 ad per page, and I try very hard to make it disappear into the website. If you put this site on your whitelist, not much will change. That philosophy is not shared by most website operators (as I’m sure you know). The other day I counted over 8 ads on some guys rather normal blog. 8 — its like I had to look for a place to click to avoid stepping on an ad.
Anyway, 2 points:
If the company itself has no real interest in the so called cheaters, why are you so intent on making the charge against them?
– I want to make a little money doing this hobby, if it so happens that by doing my hobby I can make enough to buy a new pair of shoes every month that would be great! People who rig their ads to fool people into clicking on them actually hurt the profitability of my website. Since there is no mechanism to report bad websites, all websites must be considered bad until the problem is fixed. While we are all in this state of not knowing how best to serve advertisements, advertisers themselves won’t want to pay top dollar for a sub-par service. After all, they want people to click on their ads when they are actually interested in the product, not because they have been tricked somehow.
So if you remove the pink you’re cheating?
– Yes. How is a typical web surfer to know the difference between ads on your site and content. Again, if you trick someone into showing them a product, then the advertiser has lost out (and by extension, website operators). They want people who are genuinely interested.
While your point of view is valid (since you don’t see ads, this isn’t a problem), its exactly the same as putting your hands over you eyes so you don’t see dirty magazines, global warming, jaywalking, and the yeti. They exist, they might not be a problem for you, but they are out there.
29 Jun 06
8:59 am
Ja,
I never thought if it that way. With Microsoft in both the ad’s biz and the web browser market, they’ve got us at both ends. Its like they own the company store in the mining town — you want milk, its 10 dollars. Good thing there is firefox around.
29 Jun 06
1:19 pm
Ah, you must have had your head buried to not see the next Microsoft disaster coming. The way they’re pushing Vista I fear even more. Everyone says that they’ve just recently stopped supporting old OSs so we should be fine for a while with XP and I was banking on that because I never ever want to have to use Vista but I’m starting to get this feeling like they’re really going to starve us out much sooner and force Vista down our throats for greater control. Normally I’d say screw’em but I don’t get paid to know out of date technology, grrr.
I’m kinda with Mr. Required in the anti-advertising camp. I don’t believe advertisement driven services and affiliate networking can support the web when it’s all spread so thin. Advertisers pay top dollar to compete with competition when they don’t really understand how much they’re getting ripped off.
However, I also believe Mr. Required’s logic is flawed. The advertising companies have no qualms about cheaters as long as they fly under the radar of the paying advertisers since it just means more money in the bank… I doubt they care how. I can’t even believe pay per click still exists.
For me getting rid of the opportunists and the parasites is just a matter of keeping something that was once valuable from not getting that much worse… just a matter of principle I suppose and habit.
But the other mistake is assuming people don’t click on links. I assumed the same for a while until I realized that even people I thought would know much better still click on links regularly. It’s hard to get perspective on the different levels of understanding with the web/net/technology.
One thing I’ll definitely agree to is there’s no lack of idiots out there!
Cheers,
Ja
18 Jul 06
7:27 pm
I work for a company that does have a YPN account and found this article very interesting. We have accounts with Google, Yahoo & MSN. To date, Yahoo’s customer service has by far been the worst. I can’t believe they even bother with it. I honestly wish I had talked to an answering machine instead. Not only have I been put on hold for ridiculous time periods, not ONE of my DOZEN of phone calls have EVER been resolved. In my experience, Google is the only search engine truly worth advertising with. There customer support for adwords is great. I am on a first name basis with a Rep, with a phone number & email address!
However, the business I work for targets tech people, so naturally our target market uses Google more often. If you target non-tech people, for example the elderly, yahoo & MSN may pay off real well.
06 Aug 06
2:55 pm
Click Fraud is an interesting topic - one which both clicktracks and adwatcher will stop, one which will cost you an estimated 20% of your ad budget.
This is an interesting article with valuable information. I have used both clicktracks and adwatcher to prevent clickfraud. What we and many other webmasters are starting to do is invest our marketing dollars into clicktracks, adwatcher or other ad tracker software.
If you are looking for more information on adwatcher or clicktracks i recommend you take a look at: http://www.trackingsoftwarereviews.com they have full reviews on both clicktracks and adwatcher!
Mike Baker
05 Sep 06
1:31 am
[...] This is old news, but I’ve been busy. Congratulations go out to the YPN team for listening to their detractors and instituting a method for the general public to comment on websites they see that contain YPN contextual ads. Before, you had to be a member of the YPN! network to report other members who abuse YPN’s Terms of Service (TOS) (read Abusing Yahoo!’s Contextual Advertising (YPN) — not clickfraud for a full account of the details). [...]
13 Sep 06
11:07 pm
[...] I’ve written about methods of alerting contextual advertising networks to abuse before [see Abusing Yahoo!’s Contextual Advertising (YPN) — not clickfraud] and have been pleased to see some action on the front. But things are still too complicated and time consuming. Spammers continue to prosper at the expense of us all (see why everyone loses). [...]