Oh Snap! It seems like the shit may have hit the fan a bit for YSM / Overture today. Apparently there is a class action lawsuit that has been filled against Yahoo for participating in click fraud. I found the article in the Washington post by the way of webmaster world.
An interesting point in the article is that it seems like Yahoo would poor on the clicks when their quarterly reporting was due, which is a brilliant strategy by them…but shady as hell. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Advertisers have been bitching for as long as I can remember about how crappy the traffic is from Yahoo and that it has only gotten worse as time goes on.
Numerous complaints about pay per click arbitrage as well as one page domain landers have been posted all up and down the overture forum at WMW. About a week or so some dude put out some 10 minute long video documenting how wrong all this stuff is…found here at youtube.com.
The funniest thing is that GrayWolf put out a how to article (actually a series) on how to do pay per click arbitrage on his blog in a three part series. I, II, III
So there you have both sides of the fence…those complaining about the practice, and those showing you how to do it. What are your thoughts on this whole mess? How do you think this will affect the future of the pay per click market and what do the engines need to do in order to stop this?
I was just featured in an article in Bloomberg, and quoted near the bottom. I think the whole article gets a big part of it wrong…
From an advertising standpoint MSN is one hell of a value. First off it is targeted as hell, and you can make it more targeted with their crazy passport profiling… age, sex, location, etc… pretty nice stuff….but it is even more targeted in the fact that it is PURE MSN TRAFFIC. Google cannot claim this, yahoo cannot either…both of these companies have content networks that you can opt into but both also whore their feeds out to those who have massive traffic…
There has been some big news lately about domainers and how they are showing your ads when you are not supposed to be paying for it… I am not sure if MSN is just late to the game, or if they do not have plans for this…but either way right now their traffic is 100% MSN Search… BUY IT.
The article seems to have twisted the words to make it seem like people will not spend the money on MSN because the traffic is just not there…well buddy, we would spend the money if the traffic was there, but how can you raise your budget when it will not be spent?
I think the whole point of the article should be the following: MSN has shit (in terms of volume, not quantity) traffic, but a nice product at the moment, they need more traffic and users and there will be more ad inventory for their advertisers to buy…they seemed to have upped the ante by adding some sweet targeting features to their system that Google and yahoo currently do not have in place. Advertisers would love to spend more money with them, but they cannot do to the smaller market share that MSN has compared to Google.
The bottom line is: If you are able to get a nice return on investment on you advertising spend then you spend it… MSN does give a sweet ROI, we just want more volume and we will buy it.
Are you using MSN AdCenter, and if so what do you think of it and how is it working and converting for you?
