Yahoo to Finally Allow Distribution Partner Filtering (Hip Hop Hooray!)
Yahoo has finally taken a BIG step towards solving their traffic quality problems.
For years now, their have been complaints from far and wide about their distribution network (read: parked domains). And for years now they’ve done nothing about it, leaving it up to the advertisers to solve the problem by adjusting their bids.
Now they’ve enabled a feature allowing you to load in a list of domains on which you don’t wish to appear.
It’s a major step, and it will be good for those clean domainers out there because advertisers may begin to feel more comfortable with the traffic and start up the bid races again, resulting in greater income.
However, just sitting here thinking about it, I can foresee some problems.
1. As an advertiser, you can only block the domain once you’ve been hit enough to determine it’s bad.
2. Once a domain has been blocked by enough advertisers, the fraudster will just go buy a new ‘clean’ domain. Rinse and repeat.
3. Some decent person may come along and buy a domain and find out too late that it’s already been poisoned and added to many advertisers’ blacklist.
4. Once a domain is on the advertiser’s blacklist, it may never be reviewed again for quality despite new ownership.
Some people will get hurt by this, I suppose. It will be mostly those advertisers that don’t utilize the feature or have adequate tracking and by domain acquirers that don’t do their due diligence prior to picking up a new domain.
*Caveat* This new feature just started. So far, I think it’s only available to platinum level advertisers. And whether it actually works or not remains to be seen.
