You have Incentive Based ads.. Oh yes you do!

[Discovery]

Yahoo has turned blind eye to advertisers abusing their system. So long as it brings in revenue Yahoo does not seem to care.

Email spammers and scammers have always been a PITA, but now they're taking full advantage of Yahoo's lack of enforcement.

These email spammers are using their incentive based email spam to send traffic to their own YPN landing pages.

The offers are incredulous and certainly illegal.

The interesting twist is some of the advertisers have 3-5 websites running ads on Google, Yahoo and MSN right now. And they are likely paying dearly for having so many listed on this scammers incentive based site.

Details and screenshots of

Did you know you're running incentive based marketing with Yahoo?


Discovery

[Mel66]

There's also the "Yahoo Benefit Bar" issue that sticks in my craw. Not the same as what you describe, Discovery, but it is incentive-based marketing nonetheless - they actually tell those who've downloaded the Benefit Bar to run multiple searches and click on the ads to benefit charity. I asked Yahoo to tell me how advertisers are chosen for this program (is it a content network thing? Search partner? What?) and never received an answer. Scary stuff.