Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

There are a couple bits of interesting YPN/Yahoo related news recently. The first is that Yahoo’s new product, MyBlogLog, happens to do Adsense tracking. This means that if you use MyBlogLog, Yahoo could be learning proprietary information about your Adsense to use to improve their competing YPN product:

Coincidentally, MyBlogLog (Yahoo) is also tracking information on Google AdSense — how many clicks Google AdSense ads are receiving (on webpages that have both MyBlogLog and AdSense installed), the ad unit size, and what webpage those clicks occurred. Yahoo doesn’t know the CPC for each of Google’s ads, but they do know the click-through rate (CTR) — and can specifically target high CTR publishers first, with their YPN offering.

Then in the “we made a huge bug” department, Yahoo charged their $1000 bill 50 times to a guy’s credit card, which would definitely suck for him:

Yahoo! experienced a technical issue that caused the credit cards of a few advertisers to be charged incorrectly on Wednesday, February 14. Some credit cards were authorized for one or more charges in error.

We caught this early and were able to halt the process before the charges were actually completed. We’re very sorry for any issues this might have caused you and we’re doing everything possible to completely resolve the situation as quickly as possible, and to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

So, the transition to their new Advertising platform Panama is probably not going as smoothly as they’d like, with much internal patching and scurrying, but over the next few months these kind of events will probably fade away. Bugs are to be expected with change, as are accusations of “under the table” business practices.

You don’t let me leave a comment without registering, so I’m not going to. Trackbacks are so much prettier, no?

Anyway, you tell your publishers:

Don;t manipulate our ad code. We;re flexible and already offer plenty of choices.

I have to say that’s completely nonsensical. I never used your ad code when I ran YPN ads. It was just too limiting and broken. It didn’t validate because you didn’t declare the script mime type as “text/javascript.” So, I added that to the ads myself. Then, your color picker just sucked, so I hand coded the rest of my colors. If you’ve got a problem with that, I would recommend that all your publishers drop you on moral principle. Otherwise, you might want to clarify the above statement.

What you probably meant to say is something like:

You must include the ad code from our servers, but you can customize the rest of the javascript on your site.

Wouldn’t a statement like that make more sense? It might make publishers more comfortable, too.

I’m going to be trying out the adsense injection plugin, which described by the author:

Takes a random paragraph break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story. It lets you pick how many total ads to do (0-3) and it lets you pick the formats and colors you want it to randomly select from.

So, if it’s really ugly or irritating looking, we’ll talk and make sure it gets properly removed and fix. You can leave complaints here. Note that there’s going to be a redesign of this blog soon, and the ad placement will be both more logical, less obtrusive, and generally prettier. I hate making my dedicated readers see ads, you know.