Yahoo's end run on click fraud
I've discovered an excellent site for followers of the markets: http://seekingalpha.com/ There's a ton of stuff there. The latest conference call transcripts are one of my favorites. It's one of the millions of great things that have happened to our world as a result of the web.
There's an interesting article in the digest I got this morning about Yahoo's settlement of a class action fraud complaining about click fraud. Click fraud is a major pain and drain for advertisers. Whenever someone clicks on their paid search links, the advertiser pays. So nasty minded competitors set up robots to click on their links, draining their marketing budgets. The search engines themselves, of course, have a big conflict of interest in the whole thing, because from their point of view the more clicks there are the richer they get, and they're the ones who count the clicks, so they don't have a big incentive, at least in the short term, to curb the abuse. (In fact, with some search engines of lesser repute, there have been allegations that the search engine companies themselves perpetrated the clicks). There's some number out there that around 14% of clicks are fraudulent (who knows where these numbers come from or how reliable they are, but I throw it out there as the now accepted number someone made up).
In any case, apparently there's been a class action suit on behalf of past advertisers, which is now being settled. The upshot of it is:
(a) The lawyers for the class get $5mm.
(b) If you've paid for advertising on Yahoo between January 1998 and July 31, 2006, you're automatically in the class (unless you opted out).
(c) If you didn't opt out (for example, if you never heard of the suit), it's too late to do it now.
Anyway, if you're interested, read the article:
http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/20242
And if you follow the markets, register with this site, it's really good.
There's an interesting article in the digest I got this morning about Yahoo's settlement of a class action fraud complaining about click fraud. Click fraud is a major pain and drain for advertisers. Whenever someone clicks on their paid search links, the advertiser pays. So nasty minded competitors set up robots to click on their links, draining their marketing budgets. The search engines themselves, of course, have a big conflict of interest in the whole thing, because from their point of view the more clicks there are the richer they get, and they're the ones who count the clicks, so they don't have a big incentive, at least in the short term, to curb the abuse. (In fact, with some search engines of lesser repute, there have been allegations that the search engine companies themselves perpetrated the clicks). There's some number out there that around 14% of clicks are fraudulent (who knows where these numbers come from or how reliable they are, but I throw it out there as the now accepted number someone made up).
In any case, apparently there's been a class action suit on behalf of past advertisers, which is now being settled. The upshot of it is:
(a) The lawyers for the class get $5mm.
(b) If you've paid for advertising on Yahoo between January 1998 and July 31, 2006, you're automatically in the class (unless you opted out).
(c) If you didn't opt out (for example, if you never heard of the suit), it's too late to do it now.
Anyway, if you're interested, read the article:
http://internet.seekingalpha.com/article/20242
And if you follow the markets, register with this site, it's really good.
posted by econoclast at 11:34 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home