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).

As of July 31, you can use the following email address to alert Yahoo of websites that mess with the colors, and generally try to get you to click on ads unwittingly (and thus break the TOS): ypn-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com. » Read the rest of the entry..

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).

» Read the rest of the entry..