CYBERSPACE – Good news for pay-per-click advertisers on Yahoo.com! If you went out of business while buying pay-per-click ads from Yahoo.com, you might be eligible for twenty bucks. Seriously, twenty stinkin’ measly bucks. That windfall comes courtesy settlement of a class action lawsuit that accused Yahoo.com of wrongdoing when it placed ads for its pay-per-click clients on some less-than-premium websites.If you’re keeping track, the lawyers made $4.17 million in the settlement, and everyone else split the remaining $130,000. And while the twenty-dollar “refund” to advertisers probably isn’t enough to buy a movie ticket and popcorn, it will secure an extra value meal at McDonalds – super-sized too.
Yahoo.com was sued back in 2006 after a group of advertisers say they found their ads showing up on sites that weren’t exactly quality efforts. The advertisers felt Yahoo.com had led them to believe their ads would appear on “highly targeted” sites, and that sites loaded with spyware or built solely to take advantage of typos didn’t qualify as targeted traffic.
A spokesperson for the offense said after the initial filing that Yahoo! brought the wrath of class action down on itself.
“They could have refused to partner with spyware companies,” said Ben Edelman, a spyware expert for the plaintiffs and an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. “Instead, they are partnering with spyware companies and have paid out millions of dollars in advertising money to them.”
Yahoo.com has not admitted any fault, but agreed to settle the lawsuit for $4.3 million, and to make changes to its ad placement procedures. Those changes include providing advertisers with an “option” for their ads to be placed only on Yahoo! owned websites, or on sites run by “premium partners.”
It appears though that with the lawyers’ pay decided, Yahoo! can continue to place ads on suspect websites for approximately 12 months, if it chooses, since the deadline for implementing these seemingly unremarkable concessions is Sept. 30, 2010.
The settlement comes as Yahoo! is struggling to regain its position as a dominant player in Internet search services. The Wall Street Journal has said that Yahoo! is expected to report declines in profits and sales for the third quarter of 2009. This report comes after previous news that Yahoo! lost market share in September while rivals Google and Microsoft increased their own shares of the search market.
