Four years ago, we started development on a new site for a client. Midway through development, we began administrative transfer of the domain name that had been registered by a freelance developer who had since disappeared. Everything necessary for the manual transfer was submitted to Yahoo!, but they wouldn’t approve the change of ownership. Since the domain registration only had 2 months remaining before it expired, the client decided to wait for it to return to public domain. But, it was never released. Instead, the forcibly ‘parked’ domain became home to paid advertising with the revenue, of course, going to Yahoo!.
That was a while ago. Surely, by now Yahoo! has changed its ways – they’re one of the good guys, right?
Today, I read that a class action lawsuit was filed alleging Yahoo! of syndication fraud against advertisers. The suit claims that Yahoo! actively places pay-per-click ads through seedy online channels such as spyware and adware products as well as on typosquatter sites. The suit further claims an increase in questionable placement during financial reporting periods.
Maybe the bad guys could start wearing black cowboy hats or red sashes or something – keeping track of the good guys / bad guys is so confusing these days.
One Response to “Yahoos”
[...] Apparently, a partnership with GoDaddy and eNorm will soon land Google in the domain registration business. While this one makes perfect sense to me, I hope it isn’t signalling an upcoming explosion of armchair domainers parking domains loaded up with junk aggregate content and AdSense. [...]