NEWARK, NJ /Advertising Industry Newswire/ — In a class action lawsuit brought this week against Yahoo! and its pay-per-click (PPC) unit Overture Services, Inc., plaintiff Crafts by Veronica, of Newark, NJ claims that the search portal and others have engaged in click fraud against advertisers who pay to display ads in relation to search content.
The complaint alleges that “by placing ads into illegal platforms such as spyware programs, [Yahoo] wrongfully collected high search engine advertising fees for ads that are actually shown in contexts that are worth far less, if anything. It is well known that spyware advertising is much cheaper than search engine advertising.”
The complaint continues: “But when Defendants and their syndication partners place class members’ ads into spyware, they continue to charge class members full price for those ads, and pocketing the difference between the high fees class members pay and the low cost of providing spyware-delivered advertising.”
Among the “spyware vendors” named in the complaint as partners in Yahoo’s ad program are Direct Revenue and Intermix, two companies recently sued by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer for violating consumer protection laws.
An example of customer ads shown on typosquatting sites include “Expedai.com,” which includes a Yahoo! ad for the real Expedia.com.
The Washington Post Website posted a full copy of the complaint in PDF format yesterday.
One of the attorneys of record in the case, Benjamin Edelman ( www.benedelman.org ). has a superb online resource that covers many issues related to spyware and click-fraud with excellent documentation and screen shots.
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Just for you to consider as this Yahoo lawsuit breaks (as the advertising world wakes up to how they’ve been being played by distributors of CPC ads)… were you aware of Nextag’s involvement with WhenU? That’s right, Nextag (shopping comparison engine) and WhenU.
Nextag advertisers did you know about being distributed through WhenU’s pops? Likely you did not. How about over your OWN Web site when users navigate directly to it?!
The below entry resulted in calls from a few VP’s (i.e. PriceGrabber wanted to be sure and distance themselves from the practice) and a very irritated WhenU marketing wonk. It relates directly to the transparency issue that is biting Yahoo in the bum. It’s not limited to “traditional” search engines… it’s widespread. What’s stoping advertisers from going after NexTag?
http://www.revenews.com/jeffmolander/archives/000768.html
Comment by jeffmolander — Thu, 04 May 2006 @ 21:08:45 -0700 PDT
Seaking about typosquatters, here is a free website that detects whether your site has been typosquattered
http://veralab.com/dnsdomainsearch/typosquatters.jsp
Here is what you need to do:
1. Type your company domain name into the input field below
2. Choose the root domain from the drop down list below
3. Choose the types of typos you want to be investigated
4. Click “Search” and wait for a while
The system will generate the list of possible typos and misprints and tell you whether any domain names using these typos are already taken by other people.
Provided by IBCI Law Group, a law firm specializing on copyright and trademark issues.
Comment by mkvakin — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 @ 20:17:18 -0700 PDT