Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams
politicsjunkie.com
politicsjunkie.com
It's a program organised by the DAA (Digital Advertising Alliance) which is itself formed of several other advertising associations, the goal of which is to be a self-regulatory program allowing to opt out of online behavioral advertising, so that you do not have to see any behavior targeted ads if you choose not to.
Google's display network is a part of the AdChoices program, but not every ad showing that icon is a Google ad. In fact, from the yahoo.com homepage, only the banner ads seem to be served by Google, sponsored articles are being served by Yahoo! directly. If you click the AdChoices button it will actually tell you who is placing the ad.
I'm not the biggest paladin of Google, but in this case everything points to the ad being served by Yahoo!
EDIT: From what I could find, it's likely the ads are being served by the Yahoo! streamads[0] self-serve platform.
Programmatic is always tricky to properly validate, because it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes through. It's likely that, if reported, Yahoo will ban the advertiser from their platform.
Facebook uses a whitelist approach where they'll manually validate your first few creatives and then whitelist you for automatic validation, not sure if Yahoo employs the same method.
I'm surprised they fact check any ads. Many publications don't have the budget to fact check their news, features, or editorials, never mind the ads.
Facebook gets a lot of flak for having poor ads, but they have a pretty comprehensive list of rules [0] and they actually enforce most of them through semi-manual audits of the first few ads each account creates.
Most networks will say that content of their ads must not be deceptive, but ultimately they can only audit a small percentage of them.
Usually they have heuristics to try to identify the most "high risk" categories such as adult / alcohol and they will make sure those are not being targeted to minors, as they would get in trouble otherwise. But "miracle pill" and "doctors hate him!" ads are harder to automatically filter out.
Yahoo used to use a whitelist approach too; but with RTB (programmatic buying) it is no longer feasible to do that. And unfortunately, the whole world is moving to RTB... :-(
However, RTB is just a kind of programmatic, I wouldn't be surprised if these ads were being served through the self-serve platform instead, which is probably still API-driven but doesn't need to be real time.
Advertisers shouldn't be using RTB exclusively, you could get better results when you play to the strengths of each different way of buying.
Not only is this why online advertising is ultimately doomed, but it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content.
The alternatives for the moment are gratis, patronage, "native advertising", and subscriptions. Few of these strike me as ultimately scalable.
I've been a fan of Phil Hunt, of Pirate Party UK, and his broadband tax proposal after more-or-less independently coming up with the same idea myself. Hunt's proposal was principally aimed at music. I see no reason why it cannot apply to all content published and distributed online.
http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo...
My own sketched proposal: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest... http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifyi...
So true; remove "online" from the sentence above and it's even truer.
> it's why we hugely and desperately and badly need to find another way of paying for content
Not sure about that.
Here are the ways I can think of we gain access to content:
- by directly paying for it (books, movies, etc.)
- by indirectly paying for it (ad supported newspapers articles and such)
- by paying for it via taxes (your proposal)
- because it's free.
The best content is undeniably that which people will specifically, directly buy with their own money[1].
And the second best is free.
All the other content distribution schemes produce bad content, either hollow or click-baity or just plain dumb.
My point is that AdBlock is saving the world.
1: For the purpose of this discussion, pirated is in the same category as paid-for.
Would be very difficult to have the trust and integration required for it to work though.
Ex: I'll agree to pay $X/month, and then at the end of the month, that money gets paid out to the artists I listened to based on how often I listened to them.
It probably wouldn't work, but I don't really feel any current method of music sales is really working for most artists.
It's a flat fee. That is, you're paying the same whether you fetch a single work or 10,000. Aaron Swartz's mass document mining would be supported. If you're interested in large-scale literature analysis, it's possible.
It's scaled to income / wealth. Information is part of what makes the system in which you're living possible. If the system's rewarded you, you reward the system back. Hence the tax element. Possibly scaling to some sort of connectivity plan might accomplish a similar aspect via price discrimination (of the old-school multi-tier service offering model, not the new-school hit-them-with-hidden-fees approach).
There are tiers of compensation. Pumping out white noise / easy-to-generate content doesn't necessarily buy you high compensation. Detailed scientific / journalistic work does. Penalties for inaccuracy in genres where accuracy matters, especially against deliberate distortion.
Implementation is the tricky bit.
It just doesn't work. It almost works. It is so painfully close to working that we can taste it, which is why it has hung around so long. But eventually, advertising corrupts all souls. People respond to incentives, no matter how hard they try not to, and nobody sane should really try to build a quality content-production regime on people trying really hard to act as if the incentives they are operating under aren't the incentives they're operating under. Even when it "works" for some period of time I question the effects of such long-term self-deception.
Thanks for mentioning Patreon: first time I hear about it. Sounds like a brilliant idea!
I, for one, and excited to see crowd-patronage grow. It's a model that rewards artists with cult appeal (versus the consumer model, which values mass appeal). The arts will be a little less bland.
Right now everybody in analitics is thinking in the millions of impressions but imagine if you could make £0.05 per impression.
That would be £50,000 per million views.
I wouldn't mind just having a few pounds on my youtube account and using that to avoid seeing ads.
One possibly reason is that advertising crowds out microtransactions in any practical implementation; you can either hope that your viewer has installed a microtransaction plugin and is visiting enough sites to make it worthwhile and not let the installation decay, or you can simply install ads and get 100th the price of a single transaction but get it from everybody. Microtransactions have faced a serious boil-the-ocean problem. On the other hand, under the patronage model, you get about 500-1000 people to support you with 4-5 bucks a month and now you're living a middle class lifestyle. That's not trivial, but it's not boil the ocean. (And if you can't get that, well... sorry, perhaps you're not cut out to be an internet "content creator" and live on that. I know I personally am not.)
I got that 4-5 bucks a month by running the numbers on the four campaigns I'm involved in. The averages I obtained were $7.80, $3.50, $4.50, and $3.90 per patron. 2 of those are big enough that the creators can live comfortably middle-class lifestyles on the patronage alone. One is augmenting contract cartooning work and I would imagine between the two of those things is comfortably-middle class. One of them can not on just the patronage income, but has expressed thanks on his blog for it being enough money to find a better place to live for him and his family, and the other is a now embarrassingly-oversupplied-with-money Let's Play series that's a spare time thing that certainly is worth the time the owner invests in it now. So this is not a rehash of the "microtransactions will be awesome someday in the future" argument that I've been reading; this is happening now, it's the present.
(And in all cases, when I say "comfortably middle-class", I am including both fees taken out before they get their money, taxes, and self-insuring; $60-70K a year in income is more than many people see! If they're merely making the "median US income" in cash before fees and taxes I would be less glib, though even that is impressive compared to what could be done three years ago.)
(Also, by no means am I claiming this is a random sample. You may go do your own to whatever criteria you like. But I would also reiterate that this isn't going to work for everyone, and a failed Patreon campaign isn't really the fault of either Patreon or the idea of patronage as a viable solution.)
Any data / sources to back that assertion?
See, the intense irony in your comment is that you are effectively advertising your own content using exaggerated, overhyped claim. If you consider such actions to be a net negative for the society, you are a part of the problem.
I do not disagree with you on principle and your proposal has some merit. The thing is that advertising/marketing dicussion is much more multifaceted and complex than HN collective mind portrays it to be: "advertising bad! mmkay?". The nuances and the opportunities to enact meaningful, real change in the advertising ecosystem are lost when rational discourse is suppressed by claims like "99% of advertisers are bad". Good actors should be rewarded and bad should be discouraged economically. By lumping all of them in the bad bucket, you are encouranging detrimental behaviour.
Harmful,intrusive,obnoxious advertising is a symptom, not a disease. You can't get rid of such ads without changing the underlying structure of socioeconomic reality, at least for limited cluster of audience.
My direct benefit? Discussion of elements of the proposals (I've seen some agreement, challenges, and related suggestions in the discussion above) and a possible slight uptick in awareness and mindshare around the concept.
I do find it downright amusing that an entrepreneurial site engenders criticism for entrepreneurship in the area of ideas themselves. Though not entirely surprising.
Another viable option is letting a lot of the content die. I'm sure we can all live without knowing that one neat trick that you won't believe.
In your proposal:
> ... constant challenge for any creative type is making a living.
Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone. Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable. There used to be whole industries selling ice from icebergs in London. I bet they were rather upset when domestic refrigeration became popular.
Music as a physical medium is no longer very valuable due to a nexus of the proliferation of arbitrarily reproducible data systems and a decrease in the perception of value of non live performance music.
The suggestions of a broadband tax etc are insane and the work of lobbyists and other socially destructive parasites.
Well perhaps if that's the case what you do is not valuable to anyone.
People have trouble coming to terms with the fact that they don't necessarily deserve to earn a living because they're doing something they like. It's like people are incapable of growing up anymore.
That said, artists never made much of a living, even before the Internet.
I have no problems with anyone willing to part with their money for content. I do it myself from time to time. My issue is the sense of entitlement whereby people think they should be getting money because they are performing an activity the feel should earn them money.
Which means that most of the time, you don't pay for content.
Which means that you basically pirate music.
Which means that you are the parasite, not the musician.
Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions.
There are an abundance of people who are capable of earning a living through a variety of work. There are very few people who are capable of consistently providing you with a few hours of diversion or entertainment. Do you really think that the world would be a better place if all of those lazy creative people got jobs at mcdonalds instead of making things that bring small moments of joy to billions of people? There would be no books for young children to read, no songs for teenagers to get excited about at their first dance, no movies for old people to be nostalgic about. It takes a lifetime of work to hone the skills necessary to create those things, and a lot of financial and personal risk that most of us aren't willing to assume. I don't know if a 'creative tax' is the right solution, but we could all be a little more understanding.
You are not that person. No one is.
If you ask me, you are the parasite here, not the musician who wants to make a living.
Your post only uses that word in its economic sense. Thus statements like this:
> "Over time economic cycles destroy things that were once valuable."
Are tautologies, not arguments. The set of things which people find valuable (in the subjective sense of the word, not the economic one) and the set of things which people will pay for are not equal. A great many important works of art were once produced under a patronage system, in which only one person found the artist's work "valuable".
The reason patronage as a system is no longer as prevalent as it once was is because it was once a status symbol, whereas now it is just seen as some sort of hipster endorsement of some niche thing. The ability to offer patronage to an artist was once a display of great wealth and personal connections; now it means you have an internet connection and a few spare bucks. Maybe it can still work, but the social significance of the system has changed.
I thought HN was had smart people. These are the kind of juvenile arguments I've seen snotty 13 year olds make on Reddit.
I quite agree with that. Weaponized viral clickbait most especially.
what you do is not valuable to anyone.
Unfortunately for that premise, there are far, far, far too many counterexamples of those who've created hugely valuable works but have died destitute.
Looking beyond the strictly entertainment arts, just addressing a common trope of capitalism: that it's an engine of and greatly rewards innovation.
The tale of the unrewarded genius is legion, one set of substantiation is presented in Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms looking at key inventors of the early Industrial Revolution: John Kay, James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, Samuel Crompton, Reverend Edmund Cartwright, Eli Whitney, and Richard Roberts.
Of the list, Kay, Hargreaves, and Roberts died in poverty. Crompton and Cartwright were granted substantial payments by acts of Parliament (£5,000 and £10,000 respectively), Whitney made money through arms sales to the U.S. government, and of the lot, only Arkwright earned significant wealth, half a million pounds, after his patents stopped being honored by other manufacturers.
See also numerous authors, musicians, artists, playwrights, etc., who've created masterworks but were underappreciated in their own day.
That said, I do agree, somewhat, that the Universe does not owe you a living at your chosen task.
But a bigger issue is that information and markets are very poorly matched.
Market mechanisms work best where goods are uniform (either individually or on aggregate average), their qualities are readily determined (or again tend to average out well), where the fixed costs of production are low and marginal costs of production high (relative to one another), and externalities, both positive and negative, are small relative to market price.
Information goods violate virtually all these assumptions.
⚫ Quality is highly variable.
⚫ Quality assessment is difficult, and often frustrated by other factors (e.g., pay-to-publish journals, "friendly" colleague peer reviews, discussed recently by +Joerg Fliege).
⚫ Variance of individual instances is high enough that averages rarely suffice.
⚫ Fixed costs of production are high, particularly for research, also to an extent for selection, review, and editing.
⚫ Variable costs of production (e.g., publication) are low. In fact we're utilizing a system which was specifically created to reduce those costs still further, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web, developed to transmit physics papers between CERN, SLAC, and other related facilities.
⚫ Information goods typically have very high positive externalities -- they benefit those who don't directly consume them. In the case of Dr. Grimm, those who would benefit by treatment of conditions informed by his research. Occasionally they have high negative externalities -- e.g., smallpox, "superflu", or weapons research.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/7Eer...
It is easy to see how they would try to ban porn, non-mainstream ideology and other inconvinient content from the system.
80% tax on broadband to fund advertising of gov't propaganda on the web, to crack down on un-pc opinion and to help verify your personal identity for every action on the web that you take.
The wars over public broadcasters are a significant case in point.
That said, the opposite of bad governance is not no governance but GOOD governance.
Among the reason public broadcasting entities are so vigorously opposed is that they are independent (to some extent) from the "commercial realities" of publishing and broadcast.
A system designed with no explicit limitations on who can or cannot be paid (or what works qualify) is an ultimate argument for "let the public decide". I actually differ from this in part through some selection and graduated payment system proposals -- there is fast-and-easy work which really doesn't require much incentive to produce, and highly detailed work which does require resources (e.g., international investigative journalism, scientific research).
I do see a need for graduated payment scales.
>broadband tax proposal
The Pirate Party is supposed to be pro-internet. This is just a perfect example of how shambolic and badly-organised the UK Pirate Party is, and the reason their membership has been dropping since launch. They are basically a joke party in the UK, where in other countries they have emerged as a significant political force with influence above its size.
There are plenty of obscure artists that were able to monetize their work to a certain degree.
Now are they making millions? No. They do make a small chunk of change though.
With the internet and access to so many good songs the value of a song has decreased and the entertainment industry and artists need to accept that.
After witnessing many sad political arguments on HN, I've concluded that technically skilled people are just as good as anyone else at supporting dumb political ideas.
Isn't UK the place where you have to pay license fees to watch television? Those fees are then used to support outfits like BBC. So it isn't a far stretch to imagine a similar broadband tax. I'm not supporting the tax; I'm just saying that to someone who grew up in the UK with a "license fee" model of television, a broadband tax isn't an intellectual leap, it just feels like an extension.
Plus I think you don't have to pay the fee if you can show that you don't own a television.
Not certain I agree with that model either.
Something about the person paying it not having a choice always rubs me the wrong way.
Why do i have to pay if I don't watch the BBC or download pirated stuff.
For most X, you can say that showing ads for X from people who really want to sell it to you makes life better than worse.
The least common denominator behind all these scams is: (i) recurring billing, and (ii) high margin product. An early form of it was the "free ringtone" scam which would hit your phone bill for $10 a month. Today it tends to be nutritional supplements. If you can send somebody an $80 a month bottle of pills that you can get made in China for $5, the net present value of a customer is enough that you can pay Yahoo, affiliate advertisers and others involved enough to keep the thing going.
There is a group of a few hundred people that could be described uncharitably as a "criminal ring" that are behind this stuff. Seriously, they hang out on IRC.
In the world of multilevel marketing the most interesting development is "Ambit Energy" which gets over the problem that it is hard to get people to buy a $80 a month supplement -- everybody needs electricity. However, electricity is a low margin business and Ambit offers very little benefit to consumers other than getting your friends and family members who are Ambit to shut up.
In the world of "normal" businesses where you are dealing with people who know more about their product or business than they do about the rapidly changing world of online advertising. (I read technical documentation like some people read thrillers, but reading the jargon around AdTech makes my head spin.) Also they don't have 80% margins. People like that often find it hard to make a profit with online advertising so the scammers take their place.
It talks about the BBC as a comparison, and I'm a great admirer of the BBC, but I'm not sure that's a relevant model for internet as a whole. The Beeb is governed by a specific charter covering what it should and shouldn't do. And whilst there's theoretically no government interference in day to day content, there is an explicit understanding that the government could pull their charter if they don't like what they are up to.
Only giving funding to web content that complies with a government-sanctioned charter doesn't seem a great future to me, and it becomes a worryingly small step from there to outright blocking anything that breaches it.
All the more reason to discuss it and explore what those issues might be.
However, it's because of scams and malware pushed by means of ads that I started using ad-blockers myself and I recommend it to all my non-technical friends.
It's also the reason for why on my Android I'm now using Firefox. For Google to not provide at least a glimpse of a plan for Chrome's add-ons support on Android is unacceptable, for one because I now expect my browser to have add-ons support and I originally started using Chrome based on this expectation and because on mobile these websites are even more aggressive in pushing their ads. And with Firefox I can use AdBlock Plus on my Android, with uBlock coming soon.
Did you happen to see the recent link about the AdSense redirects? e.g. http://blog.sucuri.net/2015/01/adsense-abused-with-malvertis...
Following other best practices doesn't help you to protect against that, but preventing third parties from injecting arbitrary content on the [reputable/largescale/https] websites you're viewing does close one attack channel. One out of many, but a valuable one.
I hate dealing with client-side malware. It's a time-consuming headache for my techs, it's frustrating and sometimes dangerous for the customers, and it's a loss leader for my business. I've put a fair amount of effort into never doing a malware removal or system restoration for the same customer more than once, and ad blocking software has probably been the single most effective and reliable piece of prevention.
There are plenty of ad networks that will pay you some nominal amount just to display an ad to 'users.'
Why do you think that Coca-Cola or Pepsi insist on airing expensive ads in prime time or on conducting huge marketing campaigns? Because given hundreds of choices in a super-market, you'll go for the ones that have a brand you've heard about and this is because people hate having choices ;-)
And the funny thing is, even if you're isolated from mass-media and using ad-blockers on the net, you still end up noticing marketing campaigns on Facebook, or being suckered into reading ingeniously planted news pieces on the web, or ending up making choices because of your ads-infused friends.
Thing is, advertising affects you and the products you end up buying, even if you think it doesn't, unless you're completely isolated of course.
This sort of ad is all too typical. They mash up some creative, add some annoying animation, and carpet-bomb the ad channels with it.
Sorry, if you can't screen your ads more effectively (The Deck, for example) I'm blocking you.
As a publisher it's very difficult to do anything about this since Google apparently let adwords publishers insert arbitrary javascript into their ad code. This makes it so the ad creative and "destination domain" in the review center mean absolutely nothing, and since the JS won't execute from the review center you have no idea which ads are responsible.
How do these companies survive having their merchant accounts closed after all the inevitable chargebacks?
As as a user, I've never seen these as remotely valuable.
I block both within CSS (I use a stylesheet manager) and may well block the hosts / domains they feed from.
They're absolutely worthless.
Should Yahoo be held at fault by the consumer? What does that even mean, a boycott? Does Yahoo have a direct relationship with these scammers, or how many connections away are they? Is this a network or programatic placement? Do discovery magazine and CNN go after this company for trademark issues? Does this former homeless man go after them for endorsement issues? Does it even have a US point of presence at all?
Online advertising has become and more vicious - on all my computers, I run adblock/no script, etc, but on my phone, browsing sites like retractionwatch or theatlantic, I've been redirected to full page ads for subscription services where the automatic subscription button is about 1mm where the 'close window' button appears.
and Forbes, CNN, Discover Magazine, etcetera sue both the company for plagiarism, as well as copyright and trademark infringements. They should probably sue the advertising company behind it too, those organizations have the moral obligation IMO to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the companies that buy advertising with them.
I think the article meant the http referrer needed to be yahoo?
There might be some exception that I'm not aware of, but that would seem like a pretty serious browser security issue.
I used to check out Yahoo Finance once a day because it used to have real financial news but now if you look at the front page template about 60% of it is allocated to the same scam ads that run over and over and less than 40% to real content.
Needless to say I don't use Yahoo Finance regularly anymore.
Example: Yahoo News, brought to you ad free by Nationwide Insurance
Then people think "I like Yahoo News, I like Nationwide Insurance" instead of "I hate that scummy ad, I hate Yahoo News".
That said, I wouldn't expect much that is trustworthy coming from yahoo anyway.
Yes, they do. The FTC takes them for every penny they got. At least the big ones.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark...
I missed the original submission and discussion which was here:
this seems to be reasonable force to make them find ways of filtering rouge clients.
some of payment processing companies will freeze incoming payments up to 6 months for high risk clients for example. that's a good start.
But I don't see why he can't be criminally prosecuted, at this point jailing him seems to be the only way to stop him.