I just read that the terms of running Yahoo ads on your site include blocking non-US visitors to your pages to prevent them from seeing the ads. What’s the reason for this? I suspect that it’s clickthrough fraud. If the levels of fraud demand this sort of hamfisted approach, there’s a lot of trouble brewing in ad-land.
March 22, 2006 at 4:18 pm
I actually got kicked out of the YPN program back in December for this very violation. In talking with other YPN users, it seems that there’s a certain level of international traffic that will get you banned — but they won’t tell you what it is. My site had 70% international traffic, but others with about 20% international traffic have called Yahoo and been told that their site is ok. Seems like a bit of a double-standard.
Also, Yahoo is one of the biggest internet companies in the world, and they can’t just filter out international traffic themselves? How hard would it be to modify their ad serving code to not serve ads to international visitors? Seems like the smart thing to do, rather than rely on their thousands (?) of individual publishers to do it for them.
March 22, 2006 at 10:25 pm
It’s bizarre, and somewhat pathetic. Google AdSense just deals with the issue – can’t Yahoo keep up?