How Yahoo Funds Spyware

Bastards!..shakes fist in air

Hi mr hard

I'll just park Jordan's bouncing ass RIGHT HERE

I love you Rodrigo

DH

love you mr hard

Some other articles

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Spyware/?p=650

http://www.internetnews.com/security...le.php/3531491

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/3698

DH

I miss you sweet Juicy!

See you at Adware-tech, I mean ad-tech in 3 weeks in NYC bro

What time should we meet you at Scores?

DH

no shocker really..

DH I'm sure you know about the mainstream spyware and adaware markets pretty well having attended the adtechs and exhibited and stuff.

I jsut bought a brand new toshiba laptop, guess what it came bundled with?

more adaware than you could ever imagine.


after i gutted all the oem shit out of it i ran spybot and adaware. i cannot believe the shit that these laptp and desktop manufacturers install on machines and send to people.

mediaplex
doubleclick
cydir
and a host of others. this is before the laptop even touched the internet.

just wait till the mainstream companies start straightup hijacking adult affiliate traffic right out of the box.


zango is a harmless old man with a stick compared to what is possible in the future.

big corporations could give a fuck about what adult affiliates think of them.

Funny how everyone bitches but they all support them with their dollars...

DH

oh snap i totally forgot about ad tech

I mean YHOO?????

Welcome to the internet
;)

Yahoo's Overture (recently renamed Yahoo Search Marketing) allocates pay-per-click (PPC) ads among Yahoo's network of advertisers. When users run searches at yahoo.com, Yahoo's advertisers are assigned placements at the top, right, and bottom of search results. Advertisers pay Yahoo a fee when users click on their ads.

But Yahoo doesn't just show advertisers' ads on yahoo.com; Yahoo also distributes advertisers' ads to Yahoo's various syndication partners. Many of these partners are entirely legitimate: For example, most advertisers will be happy to show their ads to users running searches at washingtonpost.com, where Yahoo sponsored links complement searches of Post articles.

However, serious concerns arise where Yahoo syndicates advertisers' ads to be shown by advertising software installed on users' PCs -- software typically known as spyware or adware. In my testing, Yahoo's funding of spyware is widespread and prevalent -- an important source of revenue for many spyware programs installed on millions of users' PCs. Were it not for Yahoo's funding of these programs, the programs would be far less profitable -- and there would be fewer such programs trying to sneak onto users' PCs.

Yahoo's funding of spyware is not unique. I've recently written about Google's funding of similar bad actors (1, 2). Earlier this year, FindWhat disclosed related problems, admitting that terminating its dubious distributors would reduce revenues by at least 5%. But in my hands-on testing of various spyware-infected PCs, I find that I receive Yahoo-syndicated ads more frequently than I receive such ads from any other single PPC network.

This article proceeds in three parts. First, I show examples of Yahoo ads supporting Claria, eXact Advertising, Direct Revenue, 180solutions, and various others; I also review the objectionable practices of each of these vendors. (Numerous additional examples on file.) Second, I review Yahoo's disclosures to advertisers -- finding that Yahoo has failed to tell advertisers about its controversial syndication partners, even in general terms. I conclude with recommendations to Yahoo (and other PPC search engines that allow syndication), as to how to put an end to this mess and avoid such problems in the future.