Anti-spyware crusader and Harvard researcher Benjamin Edelman has placed his microscope over Internet media giant Yahoo, Inc, reporting that he's found traces of what appears to be click fraud,
starting with adware vendors and ending with the Web portal. Edelman claims adware vendors, including 180solutions, displayed pop ads on his computer that appear to commit click fraud, a practice that
involves using an automated program to repeatedly click on an ad, usually deployed by competitors to drive up an advertiser's costs and eventually shore up their budget. In this instance, Yahoo, which
sells display ads through syndication agreements with partners, offloaded some ads to other marketing firms, who passed them along until they landed at the adware companies'. Adware companies install
advertising-supported software on users' computers, monitoring their browsing behavior and serving pop-up ads based on that data. When the Yahoo ads served by the adware companies pop up, Edelman says
the appearance is registered by the Web giant as a click regardless of whether the user clicked on the ad or not. Each time a click is registered with Yahoo, the Web portal receives money from the
advertiser, which it shares with the adware vendor and any other middlemen involved in the transaction. Here, the click fraud refers to the adware programs' automating of each click, regardless of
consumer action. In an e-mail statement, Yahoo said it would look into the allegations and terminate any relationships deemed necessary by internal research. Any wrongdoing on the part of Yahoo isn't
necessarily actionable in this case, since it's likely that the firm had no idea this was going on in the first place. 180solutions, the only adware company quoted in the article, strenuously denied
the claims made in the report.
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