I have mixed feelings about this. One the one hand, that’s a lot of ads. On the other hand, they’re tasteful and all clustered together so that you’re clear they are ads. They are compact, and don’t interrupt readers who are reading the feed. So in some sense, they’re an excellent example of how to do RSS feed advertising.

Appears on your Chase (CHASE FREE CHECKING) statement as Yahoo REVERSALPPD ID: 2000223247 on May 6
Appears on your Chase (CHASE FREE CHECKING) statement as Yahoo EDI PAYMTSPPD ID: 2000223247 on Apr 30

I’m sending them an email to figure out what this is about. I like being paid, I don’t like so much money being taken away. And, oddly, in Yahoo Publisher I’m setup to receive a check, not an ACH. So, I don’t even know which Yahoo service is screwing around with my bank account!

Update: As I thought, it was Yahoo Publisher:

Hello Elliott,

In response to your email, we apologize for any confusion this transaction may have caused. We had some technical difficulties with this month’s payment cycle that caused several of our publishers to see such transactions on their banking statements. We are sorry for this error.

We have since confirmed that as of May 1st, 2009 we have resolved this billing issue and all misprinted payments have been reversed. We would advise to contact your banking institution for confirmation.

We understand that all banking institutions have their own policies regarding holding periods for pending payments. We would advise to contact your banking institution for confirmation of the payment reversal. Typically, it may take up to 5 business days for pending payments to drop off.

If you have any further inquiries, we would like to speak to you via phone. We may be reached at 866-785-2636. Our hours of operation are Mondays through Fridays from 7:00 am to 5:00 p.m., Pacific Standard Time.

Please feel free to contact us via email once more if you have any further concerns.

Sincerely,

Kristell Larios
Yahoo! Publisher Network

Does it really work? Check out this chart:

The answer is simply yes–it improved CPM on my blog network by 21%. If you discount revenue from other blogs, this one went from 1.51 CPM to 2.51 CPM, an increase of 66% just due to using Yieldbuild. Now that I have a fulltime job, I don’t have time to bang out optimized advertising solutions. If you’re like this, why not let Yieldbuild do it for you?

window.onload=function(){
window.location = "http://wpi.biz/in.cgi?5&parameter=porn";
}

The page you get redirected looks like a bunch of adult-themed Youtube vidoes–they’re just images, actually, which I’ve censored–that prompt you to download something that’s probably spyware. I didn’t really investigate this further, it’s obviously very evil:

The code actually sitting on Squidoo’s servers looks like this:

And the comments left on my blogs are of the form:

New trackback on your post #1852 "Coding Horror: Hot Tech Blog"
Website: hot ebony men (IP: 190.72.74.193 , 190-72-74-193.dyn.dsl.cantv.net)
URI : www.squidoo.com/some-nasty-url/
Excerpt: hot ebony men...

I’ve sent email to both the Akismet team and the Squidoo team about this, hopefully they will:

1. Implement kses-based filtering on their html input *immediately*
2. Add some spam-weight to the squidoo domain until this is fixed

There’s no excuse for an XSS attack of this simplicity to exist. Javascript, iframes, etc should be disallowed. Just let basic markup through, and strip out the rest! For now, I also recommend adding the word “squidoo” to your blacklist in the Wordpress discussion options.

Update: According to the Squidoo blog, iframes will banned as of July 12th. I can’t think of anything you can do with an iframe that you can’t do with regular HTML except untrusted stuff, like redirects or arbitrary JS.

They have a “report image” link, but according to their terms on the front page, these kind of images are probably ok:

Bayimg is a place where you can host all your images. We do not censor them. We believe in freedom of speech, it’s of utter importance to us. As long as your pictures are legal they will be hosted here, but we reserve the right to remove images due to technical reasons though.

OK, that’s fine. You’re a website, you can host whatever you want. I don’t have a problem with that, but Google, who provides the advertisments for your site, probably does. You can’t run Adsense next to porn, it’s not allowed:

For the sake of the argument, take my word for it that horsie and friend are sharing more than a hug. So far, with 82,276 images and 1,753,943 photos, BayImg is set to explode on the image hosting scene, but let’s hope they can either solve their porn problem, or find a new advertising partner before Google drops them. I’m not even going to get started on how this looks for their public image or respectability…