Dear Yahoo! / Digg, What Were You Thinking?
December 17th, 2007 in Web Design Culture
by: Matthew Griffin
About a week ago, I was browsing Digg when suddenly I felt as if I had stepped into a time warp. I half expected my flat screen monitor to shrink and morph into fish-eyed CRT in front of my eyes. There on the home page was a giant banner made up to look like a Windows error dialog box. It was blinking red with a familiar X icon in the left-hand corner and it read "You are the 1,000th visitor: Congratulations you won!". I call this advertising "punch the monkey" advertising in honor of a flash ad that circulated a few years ago. You still see it around on cheesy sites but Digg knows better. So what could be worse than a site in the Alexa top 200 claiming that you are the 1,000th visitor? How about the Alexa #1?
A few days later, my wife was on Yahoo and there it was—only this time it claimed she was the 999,999th visitor (I guess they figured they needed to up the number a little for a behemoth like Yahoo). My curiosity was sparked. I did the unthinkable—I clicked on it. Here's where it gets really interesting.
The link takes you to a page on website called yourgiftpro.com. The page has a big header that says, "Congratulations! Select your FREE laptop!". Of course, there is an asterisk next to "FREE" and I don't even need to know why. The domain is registered to a company called NetBlue Inc (formerly YFDirect Inc). A quick Google search reveals a sordid history. The company has had multiple law suites filed against it for grievances ranging from trademark infringement to scam spamming. Complaints about the company also appear on ripoffreport.com, McAfee Site Advisor, complaintsboard.com, scam.com, and the yfdirect.com domain name has been blacklisted by several spam filtering sites. But the cherry that topped it all off was when I searched for "yourgiftpro" on Yahoo! itself and "yourgiftpro scam" popped up as a related search phrase. This is like Dateline airing an expose on a product that is being advertised between the segments of the same show. Dateline would be a laughing stock and so should Yahoo! and Digg.
With YFDirect/NetBlue's shady marketing tactics so easily discoverable, why did Digg, and especially Yahoo, allow these ads to run? Even if yourgiftpro wasn't so notorious, the claim of the banner that you are the 999,999th visitor is so obviously fraudulent, it's laughable. It's Yahoo! and Digg's responsibility to protect visitors from infamous advertisers like this one and, in this case, they failed miserably. Yahoo! / Digg, What were you thinking?
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Comments
Posted By: Andrew on 12/17/07
You know, I use Y! mail for ages, but I haven't ever seen this 99999 in it. I know this annoying window and as many other users I hate it. Surprisingly it's very popular on the web. I usually see it one or two times a week. I guess that happened because of third party advertizers. BTW I've seen this 999999 as a Google text ad, too. Ads SUCKS!
Posted By: on 12/17/07
I hadn't seen it on Google. Thanks for information, Andrew.
Posted By: Alexis Brion on 12/17/07
In an ideal world, yes, it would be Yahoo's responsibility to protect visitors. Unfortunately, I don't think the really is even close to that.