Just So You Know
Product Guidelines for Ads Explained
We all have standards. Like yours, Yahoo!’s standards are pretty high. We pride ourselves on them. We want everyone, from advertisers to publishers to users, to have the best experience that we can give them. So the following guidelines were developed to ensure a positive experience for everyone:
Yahoo! Publisher Network ad units:
- May not be obscured in any way
- Must be shown in the requested page, not as a pop-up or pop-under window or in an e-mail
- Must be clearly labeled as “Ads by Yahoo!”, and this label should not be confused with other advertising or links on the publisher’s page
- Must not be associated with images or media on the page
Also, users must be able to tell the difference between the Ad Unit and other content on the page.
Pages that contain Yahoo! Publisher Network ad units:
- Must be content-based, fully functional and not contain any broken links
- Must be in English or Spanish, and be consistent with the language of the listings
- Must respond adequately to user requests
- Must not actively encourage users to click on ads
- Must not disable the browser’s back button
- Must not spawn more than one partial pop-up/pop-under window, and this window must not interfere with user navigation
- Must not automatically replace the browser homepage
In addition, we have some guidelines for the type of content that we don’t want associated with our ads. Please check them out.
If you haven’t already read it, be sure to take a peek at our post on “Maintaining a Quality Network.”
– The Team
| Post Comment | categories:: Announcements
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Maybe you should add this point to the Yahoo! Publisher Network ad units: Must not be disguised by other objects of the page.
Just a thought…
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:29 pm
[quote]Also, users must be able to tell the difference between the Ad Unit and other content on the page.[/quote]
Does this mean that the ad units have to be a different color then your template/layout? That you can’t use the same fonts as the ad unit? That you have to use a border of a different color then the background color of the ad unit.
That open up a bunch of “more details needed” type of questions over that rule.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:12 pm
Blending ads to match your page is part of the WHY contextual advertising works. If we are going to make sure that all of the ads stand out like a sore thumb then we might as well all go back to just placing flashing banners on our pages. Perhaps the talking smiley face banners??? I hear they pay well.
This is vague at best and really needs to be defined. The sad thing is that the websites that have 10 million impressions a day will get away with murder and the little guy that tried to make his site look really nice will get punished because his ads look too much like his content.
C. Crawford
Affiliate Website Forum
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:33 pm
Reguarding this:
“Must not be associated with images or media on the page”
what does that mean? does that mean we cant put ads beside images on our sites or what??
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:55 pm
The broken links thing needs to be addressed as well. If I have a page which goes to a page that isn’t there anymore, is that defined as a broken link? What if I forget the closing quote mark, is that a broken link?
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:01 pm
Come on ypn, answer some of these questions :-\
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:21 pm
[…] Today, Yahoo posted their guidelines for ads. I didn’t really see anything new, but the post seems to have ticked off a few publishers. I’m still waiting for YPN to offer alternate ads to show when there’s no relevant ads. The site looks bad when there’s a big blank area above your content. […]
May 24th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Hi YPN guys, I’ve found yet another myspace site disguising your ads as content and consequently wasting your time and your advertisers’ money.
The site in question is here.
Any news on a formal complaint process? As a long time adwords and adsense customer, I’m eager to begin advertising with Yahoo! but not until there is a clear mechanism in place for dealing with what amounts to fraudulent clicks.
May 25th, 2006 at 5:59 am
Ben. That site looks fine. Stop posting crap about other people’s sites. It just pisses yahoo off. Please stop posting BS on this blog.
YPN answer some of our questions!!!
May 25th, 2006 at 6:26 am
@ “inferno”, I phoned YPN yesterday and was told in plain English by a YPN rep that the ad placement (check the lower two blocks - featured links & featured resources) constitute “click inducement”. Go fix your site or cry somewhere else.
May 25th, 2006 at 6:30 am
PS. If you think I post BS on *this* blog, you should check mine out. I’m much more eloquent about the kids scamming YPN & Google on my blog.
May 25th, 2006 at 8:20 am
Ben, I am guessing that you have gotten terminated by Yahoo and Google Adsense because you are trying to bring other people down. Those sites were find
May 25th, 2006 at 8:43 am
heh @ inferno, I’m not eligible for YPN till they open internationally. My AdSense account is doing very well though, I should receive a nice payment some time today actually. My AdWords campaigns are performing reasonably but not as well as they could.
Your definition of “fine” is contrary to Yahoo’s, which clearly indicates that you’re wrong. A YPN rep told me on the phone that the site was not meeting the requirements. You can argue all you want, it doesn’t change the FACT that a YPN rep looked at the site while I was on the phone to him and stated the lower ads constitute “click inducement”.
May 25th, 2006 at 9:13 am
7 adblocks
YPN really needs to set a limit.
May 25th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Thanks YPN Team. My questions have been answered
May 25th, 2006 at 2:07 pm
All,
We wanted to clarify some of the points in this post and address some of the comments above.
When we state that ad units “must not be associated with images or media on the page,” what this means is that it must be clear to users that the ad listings are paid advertisements. Compliance with this policy greatly reduces the risk that users will inadvertently click on YPN listings, mistakenly believing that they are clicking on content-related links as opposed to paid advertisements.
We also wanted to assure you that we are building a mechanism for publishers and users to provide feedback on how Yahoo! Publisher Network ads are displayed on publisher sites. We will, of course, let you know once this solution is available. For the time being, publishers in our network can contact our Customer Solutions team via the Support link in your account if you have specific concerns.
- The YPN Team
May 26th, 2006 at 4:41 am
Since I don’t have a YPN account and can’t report them through the above method, I’ll just drop a very unsubtle hint here.
This guy has now formatted his ads so that the url is barely visible, making it even more likely people will click without thinking.
May 26th, 2006 at 5:19 am
Also worth checking out is the way skize.com puts little images next to your ads.
Layouts2.com is also very good at doing that, they have a nice mix of ‘above horizontal’ and ‘beside vertical’ images.
Then there’s zeebler.com, they’ve done a great job of disguising ads as content, what with the images beside ads (oh wait, there’s a 2px line between them, there’s no way anybody could confuse the ads as being part of the images right?).
Zeebler also does some cool stuff where they put a big block of ads in a ’section’ with a tiny amount of content pushed over on the side.
May 26th, 2006 at 8:26 am
Thanks ben_! I never have even seen these myspace pages you link to til now, and yes they are rather scrapish for content and the amount of ads is in a word OVERWHELMING. The sites you mention are my guide of how NOT to place your ads on a site. Clicking links from these sites they all seem basically, no wait, EXACTLY the same, with different urls. Scraper indeed.
May 26th, 2006 at 11:48 am
@ Brady - yeah, it’s really a joke. They’re blatantly “made for ads” and do everything they can to get as many accidental clicks as possible.
The scam doesn’t even end there, a lot of them create the site and promote them for 1 month, get their ridiculously high clickthru rate and then sell them on ebay and sitepoint claiming an incredible revenue.
I feel sorry for anyone who buys a “$xx,xxx” a month site because you know when YPN and Google take notice they’re going to be slammed down to a more realistic $100/month income.
Here’s another three for the YPN guys:
MySpaceTotal.com is doing the image thing, but with a sexy twist. Hot chicks in bikinis next to the YPN ads. My favourite is the 2nd one.
Layout-Space.com is also doing the image thing, just in case having only ads above the fold wasn’t enough to get attention on them.
MySpaceGeek.net is *also* doing the image thing. You’d think they could come up with a more creative way but meh.
Also @ the YPN guys, if you have an email address I can report violators to directly instead of filling up your blog, feel free to shoot me an email - fkr [at] moddedup [dot] com. It’d probably be easier if I could just email a “daily list”
May 26th, 2006 at 11:59 am
@ Brady - yeah, it’s really a joke. They’re blatantly “made for ads” and do everything they can to get as many accidental clicks as possible.
The scam doesn’t even end there, a lot of them create the site and promote them for 1 month, get their ridiculously high clickthru rate and then sell them on ebay and sitepoint claiming an incredible revenue.
I feel sorry for anyone who buys a “$xx,xxx” a month site because you know when YPN and Google take notice they’re going to be slammed down to a more realistic $100/month income.
May 26th, 2006 at 12:18 pm
Here’s another three for the YPN guys:
MySpaceTotal.com is doing the image thing, but with a sexy twist. Hot chicks in bikinis next to the YPN ads. My favourite is the 2nd one.
Layout-Space.com is also doing the image thing, just in case having only ads above the fold wasn’t enough to get attention on them.
MySpaceGeek.net is *also* doing the image thing. You’d think they could come up with a more creative way but meh.
If someone @ YPN wants to shoot me an email so I can report things directly instead of messing up your blog, feel free to - fkr [at] moddedup [dot] com.
June 5th, 2006 at 3:21 pm
how does http://www.circuitbreakercatalog.com comply with these standards? The entire site consists of nothing but Yahoo ads.
June 5th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
Ooops! made a typo — the site I’m questioning about is http://www.circuitbreakerscatalog.com. Sorry. Bob
June 5th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
actually, it looks like they’re using some type of redirection, as you get the page of Yahoo ads at
http://www.circuitbreakerscatalog.com/Results.aspx?query=Circuit%20Breakers&sessionid=qcmigaefqqvzie45kv1imhjl&cc=us&ns=1
This comes from clicking on their ad in Google
June 6th, 2006 at 6:07 am
This site ehobo.com does some fancy colour stuff so you can hardly see anything but the title of the ad. I’m glad that’s not my money being wasted on junk traffic.
June 22nd, 2006 at 8:23 pm
[…] Consider the comments by Ben_ on this post at the YPN blog. Ben_’s site, http://www.moddedup.com features his rants about the contextual advertising racket. Its an interesting read, I don’t agree with the tone of his message (personally, I would be a bit more professional [but thats just me]) nor always his point of view, but I do like people who get results. The advertisements I used as examples above come from websites Ben_ has pointed out to Yahoo!. Recently, the site in question seems to have stopped using Yahoo! ads…. is this because Ben_ has been complaining? Who knows. […]
June 27th, 2006 at 7:47 am
[…] Announcements Yahoo! Publisher Network and Yahoo! news, policies and policy changes; planned outages, etc. […]
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