Yahoo Alledgedly Offers Misleading Ads

Yahoo Alledgedly Offers Misleading Ads

Yahoo is currently under fire for offering publishers a menu of choices for what ad appears in their site, may it be legal or not.


Yahoo Right Media's Direct Media Exchange provides publishers the preference of operating or barring various ads depending on their "deceptiveness." Among the ads in question are graphical advertisements which are created to disguised as Windows dialogue boxes, and ads that contain bogus "close window" buttons or pull-down menus. In reality, this ad leads the user to a web site instead of closing the window or generating a pull-down menu.



Direct Media Exchange is a free ad network manager that helps users sell their inventory easily and gain maximum revenue. It is a publisher tool that allows users to auction their inventory and manage their overall ad network relationships.



Despite several criticisms, Right Media maintains that Direct Media Exchange simly creates an open marketplace for advertisers and publishers. According to Ben Edelman, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, Yahoo should not be supporting deceptive ads on its network. He also added, "It's hard to defend these ads' tactics. They intend to deceive, and by all indications, they succeed. They have no proper place in Yahoo's ad network."