
Yahoo Homepage – Now Featuring Extra-Scammy Scams - rosenjon
http://politicsjunkie.com/yahoo-homepage-now-featuring-scams/
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mpeg
Just want to point out that AdChoices is NOT owned by Google, and they do NOT
serve any advertising.

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.

[0] [https://streamads.yahoo.com/](https://streamads.yahoo.com/)

~~~
troymc
You wrote "it's expensive to fact check every single creative that comes
through"

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.

~~~
skygazer
I worked at Earthlink in the mid nineties, and happened to sit next to the
girl that approved all the ad placements on the site's (yahoo-like) start
page. She would casually lean over and ask me if this or that medical claim
seemed plausible. I typically said no. The claims were often so snake oily
even the most modest biology background, or just common sense would refute
them. Thankfully she had the sense to ask.

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dredmorbius
99% of online advertisers give the rest a bad name.

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...](http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/)

My own sketched proposal:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/)
[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifyi...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specifying_a_universal_online_media_payment/)

~~~
easytiger
> 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.

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.

~~~
skylan_q
_... 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._

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.

~~~
karmacondon
Something tells me that you benefit daily from the efforts of people who had
difficulty earning a living from their craft at some point. Do you listen to
music, watch television or movies, appreciate art, read books or web content?
The creators of those things didn't all start out as highly acclaimed
millionaires. Most of them spent years making things that weren't valuable to
anyone.

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.

~~~
easytiger
And yet, despite this apparently dire situation, their output still exists.

~~~
dredmorbius
But who is benefiting from its existence? The creators or the current license
holders?

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bad_user
I was originally against ad-blockers, because it provides me with an incentive
to look for alternatives and I also want to reward websites that don't do this
shit.

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.

~~~
rimantas
I am thinking, maybe I should get an ad-blocker. Not tu reward the webistes,
but stop punishing poor folks who buy ads and then waste money showing them to
me, because I never click them…

~~~
saiya-jin
ads are paid by click, no? so if you don't click, no harm done

~~~
nkozyra
Some are CPM/RPM, some are CPC and some ultimately require an arbitrary
"action" which can sometimes be a conversion.

There are plenty of ad networks that will pay you some nominal amount just to
display an ad to 'users.'

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r1ch
Adwords is becoming increasingly bad with these kind of ads lately. Yahoo are
lucky that they don't have the automatic redirecting version that simply takes
visitors away from your site onto these fake landing pages. Most of them seem
to be coming from compromised adwords accounts.

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.

~~~
coldpie
I have no idea why ad networks don't have two fields for advertisers: a plain
PNG image and a URL to link to. I guess the answer is somehow "money," but I
feel like client websites would have enough incentive to switch to the network
that works this way to avoid this BS for their users.

~~~
phamilton
Most ads use multiple tracking pixels for various 3rd party analytics and
measurement. Some of these analytics require runtime inspection of the page to
confirm things like domain, viewability, height and width, page language,etc.
So your average ad requires loading a dozen empty images ("pixels") and
running a bit of JavaScript.

~~~
coldpie
And people are baffled when they learn I use NoScript.

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nugget
This is the dark side of the massive shift to programmatic ad buying and
selling which nobody wants to talk about. Compliance has largely been tossed
aside in search of maximum yield. Sad but definitely the trend for the future.

~~~
vdaniuk
Do you have any citation for this? I am not seeing more bad actors when
working with various programmatic ad exchanges.

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DanBC
> “[...]I ordered one bottle of Brain Storm Elite, entered my payment and
> shipping info, next thing I know, I have been charged $144 for another
> product “The Memory Plus”. I NEVER gave “MP” any CC information or anything,
> when I called BrainStorm about this, they say they are affiliated but do not
> have access to Memory Plus accounts, I asked how Memory Plus got my credit
> card information because the only website I was on was for BrainStorm. Big
> Surprise, someone else would have to get back to me on that. Filed report
> with BBB.”

How do these companies survive having their merchant accounts closed after all
the inevitable chargebacks?

~~~
bhartzer
All they do is rebrand and start up another company under another name.

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mbesto
My favorites are Taboola and Outbrain who basically do this as a turnkey
service. They've both received $99m+ in funding...

As as a user, I've never seen these as remotely valuable.

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/taboola)

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/outbrain)

~~~
dredmorbius
"Favorites" in what sense? As in "favorite to hate"?

I block both within CSS (I use a stylesheet manager) and may well block the
hosts / domains they feed from.

They're absolutely worthless.

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jarcane
This kind of thing is, frankly, yet another reason why I employ an adblocker.

~~~
RedneckBob
That is why I don't mind almost all current advertising, my ad blocker
(disconnect.me) does a fantastic job.

------
brokentone
I've worked primarily on the publisher side and observed such advertisements,
but where to point the finger can be really difficult. There are so many
affected parties here.

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?

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Fede_V
This is great detective work, and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this.

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.

~~~
Cthulhu_
> and hopefully Yahoo steps in and fixes this.

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.

~~~
coldcode
All shell companies I bet.

------
martinko
Hm, now the link in the article (www.discoverpresentsonline.com/david-
brain/report.html) just redirects to the real discover magazine.

~~~
shawabawa3
In the article it mentions it only lets you see the article if you have the
tracking cookie from the ad

~~~
thaumaturgy
That part made me scratch my head a bit, because they shouldn't have access to
Yahoo cookies.

I think the article meant the http referrer needed to be yahoo?

~~~
coldpie
Possibly. Can you set cookies over JavaScript? Ad networks allow ad providers
to inject arbitrary JavaScript into their clients' websites.

~~~
thaumaturgy
You can set and read cookies using Javascript, but due to same-origin policies
that are present in all modern browsers, it shouldn't be possible for a non-
Yahoo domains to read cookies set by Yahoo.

There might be some exception that I'm not aware of, but that would seem like
a pretty serious browser security issue.

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PaulHoule
It has been way for a while, but it has gotten worse.

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.

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hellbanTHIS
Seems like branding is the way to go on the internet, rather than throwing
crap in peoples faces.

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".

~~~
GhotiFish
personally, if I see something branded, then of primary concern to me is if
their opinion is compromised.

That said, I wouldn't expect much that is trustworthy coming from yahoo
anyway.

------
owly
Anyone have experience blocking ads at the firewall level? Possibly too many
URLs to block? Also, what's Yahoo? ;) DDG FTW

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dnlmzw
That is quite disturbing.

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blumkvist
>Do companies like Brainstorm Elite ever pay the price for wholesale fraud and
the theft of brand identities?

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...](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-dark-lord-of-
the-internet/355726/)

~~~
tim333
Whereupon their creators it seems walk away and start the next dodgy company.
Glancing at the Atlantic article "Jesse Willms is doing just fine
financially—and he has a new yellow Lamborghini to prove it" and is
advertising "just $1 for a vehicle-history report" and then billing $199 to
peoples credit cards. Methinks the laws could be tightened a tad.

~~~
blumkvist
Internet sarcasm fail. I'm sorry.

------
chatman
Shame on Yahoo!

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argc
This makes me want to puke. Nice one, Yahoo.... makes you look GREAT.

