Fergie's Tech Blog

Ben Edelman: The Spyware - Click-Fraud Connection -- and Yahoo!'s Role Revisited

The Guru of All Things Adware & Spyware, Ben Edelman writes over on his blog:

In August I reported a startling number of notorious spyware programs receiving payments, directly or indirectly, from Yahoo!'s pay-per-click (PPC) (Overture) search system. Yahoo pays numerous other companies to show these ads via syndication relationships.

So when a spyware vendor can't find advertisers to buy its ad inventory directly, the spyware vendor can show Yahoo ads instead. Every time a user clicks on such an ad, the advertiser must pay Yahoo. Then Yahoo pays a revenue share to the spyware vendor that showed the ad. My August article documented relationships between Yahoo and 180solutions, Claria, Direct Revenue, eXact Advertising, IBIS, and SideFind.

My August article covered "just a few of the ... examples I have observed and recorded." Since then, my Yahoo-spyware collection has grown dramatically. I now have many dozens of different examples of Yahoo pay-per-click ads shown within spyware.

posted by Fergie @ 4/04/2006 07:12:00 AM