Kudos To Yahoo's Click Fraud Department For Refund

[Elisabeth]

After a long, hard day of powder skiing here in Utah...

I happened to check my email and was pleasantly surprised to see a couple of automatic emails from YSM notifying me that they had automatically credited a few (one was a fairly significant dollar figure) of my clients' accounts for "some unusual clicks on your account that were not detected before they reached your account balance."

This was the first time I'd personally seen anything of the sort, and maybe others have had this experience already, but I for one was glad to see it after a dramatic click fraud issue this one client in particular had in January/February (mainly due to content match issues, but I digress).

In any case, I just wanted to give credit where credit was due to Yahoo! Search Marketing. I hope they keep up the good work!

The cynic in me says perhaps it has something to do with being proactive in terms of Google's recent Settlement of $90 Million in a class action lawsuit (but maybe not - let's give YSM some credit to stand on its own)

[andrewgoodman]

We recently received word of a substantial refund that we were not even claiming was fraud, just a spike in content spend that was quite unwanted ($1,400 in a day before we turned off content). (Of course it probably was fraud, but Y! could have easily claimed that the shifting sands of content led to a higher spend.)

Credit where credit is due, in any case. All they need to say is they are refunding unwanted clicks on a "good will basis" in certain situations. They needn't admit that every case is click fraud, since that may not be provable and may be a damning admission to make.

[AussieWebmaster]

yeah we got $4300 back so far... though nothing for any of the foreign language accounts.

[stumpy27]

So far I have received about $4500 back. As far as I can tell, it is all for content clicks that were charged to my accounts from Feb 9th - 11th. I questioned my Y! rep on the following Monday and he said they would look into it, but I didn't hear much afterword. Does anyone have similar info regarding the nature of their "unusual" clicks. It will be interesting if our issues are isolated to the same dates.

Now, while I do agree that it is nice to get this credit, I have a few concerns... Rarely does Yahoo! do anything proactive, so I feel this might be a reaction to Google's 90M settlement from last week.

My other concern is that due to Y's "unusual" clicks, my company gave them what is, essentially, an interest free loan for the past 30 days. Since we have the cash flow to float this kind of situation, I don't worry about too much. But, what about the little guy, whose account was depleted with nothing to show for it for 30 days? It could really hurt him/her.

[sportsguy]

Certainly is very positive news to hear from folks seeing Y!'s click fraud program in action. Very nice.