Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Expediantly Exacting Revenge

A while back our man Evan wrote about his frustration with Expedia for not fulfilling reservations that he paid for in good faith. Because the post references Expedia several times, Yahoo's ad server decided to place Expedia ads alongside his derogatory musing.

This confluence of events gave readers who were similarly unhappy with Expedia the chance to click on their pay-per-click ads, thereby costing Expedia money (not that we would ever condone doing so). Yahoo eventually stopped placing the Expedia ads on the page, which still gets a fair amount of traffic.

We imagine that this isn't the first time this has happened ads adjacent to text that slams the advertiser, so there's probably an opportunity for assessing the context within ads appear. Also, an ad server tool that quickly alerts the advertiser to dramatic increases in the click throughs from a specific domain would help to eliminate the click fraud that can put a hurting on a company. Since Google gets the overwhelming majority of its revenue from PPC ads, one might think that they would be paying more attention to this problem.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 07:56 PM
Permanent Link: Expediantly Exacting Revenge | Comments (0)

Post a Comment

Name:
Email:
WebSite:
Comment:
Remember Me
Subscribe