Yahoo Search Marketing - ‘We Know We suck’
Just before Pubcon I got a email from Michelle Nakasone from Yahoo Search Marketing telling me that a big portion of my leads to Yahoo Search Marketing were by stolen credit cards. Here was the exact email:
On Nov 28, 2007, at 3:14 PM, Michelle Nakasone wrote:
Hi Jeremy,
This is Michelle Nakasone from the Yahoo! Affiliate Team. I wanted to contact you about a matter that the Yahoo! Search Marketing Team recently brought to our attention.
YSM recently completed a quality audit of all affiliate referred YSM accounts. The results showed that 65% of your traffic is signing up for YSM with stolen or unauthorized credit cards. We fully understand that you are not intentionally sending us fraudulent traffic. However, the YSM team is requiring us to terminate our relationship with you by Friday (11/30). I wanted to give you a heads up in advance to see if there was anyway you could filter or prevent fraudulent users from coming through your website/links. If so, we’d like to continue our partnership.
Let me know if you’d like to jump on a call to discuss further.
Best regards,
Michelle
First I thought someone was playing a joke on me who saw my presentation at Blog World on how I promoted the Yahoo Affiliate programs… So I wrote back:
From: Jeremy Schoemaker
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:17 PM
To: Michelle Nakasone
Subject: Re: Fraudulent Yahoo Search Marketing Signups
Importance: HighUmm what the hell?
what urls are they coming from??
to which she responded:
On Nov 28, 2007, at 3:29 PM, Michelle Nakasone wrote:
Jeremy,
We can give you the referring URLs for all of your traffic, but I don’t believe CJ ties or logs a specific referring URL to each transaction in their reporting. Therefore we can’t tie discrete clicks to the fraudulent sign ups. We’d love to keep you in the program if we can find a way to address this issue.
Michelle
To then me:
From: Jeremy Schoemaker
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 1:53 PM
To: Michelle Nakasone
Cc: friends@yahoo
Subject: Re: Fraudulent Yahoo Search Marketing SignupsWell Michelle-
If you keep no logs of referring urls then….. I guess you just can’t do any sort of quality control.
I feel this really reflects badly on Yahoo!
I have worked very hard in this industry and have built a good reputation driving quality traffic. If you can’t tell what urls are driving what traffic to your website how am I ??
I think the answer is pretty simple… my website - shoemoney.com is where 100% of my traffic comes from. If it is coming from other sources I can not control them and feel free to not give me credit for them.
I have no clue what could be causing this issue.
Maybe you could help me and tell me what normally makes people use invalid and stolen credit cards and how do I stop them from using your service.
Jeremy
To which she responded:
Michelle Nakasone wrote:
I’m not exactly sure why users going through your links are using fraudulent credit cards and how to distinguish these users from the rest of your audience. Since you are a trusted and experienced online marketer, I wanted to chat with you first instead of expiring you from our program. If you have any way to remedy the situation, I’m all ears.
Give me a call if you’d like to discuss further: xxx-xxx-xxxx
Ok so WTF YAHOO! ???????? What kind of mickey mouse operation do you have going on over there? You can’t detect what urls are bringing in what traffic and you have no idea how to stop fraudulent credit cards. Now thats hot!
So I respond with:
From: Jeremy Schoemaker
Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2007 5:59 PM
To: Michelle Nakasone
Subject: Re: Fraudulent Yahoo Search Marketing SignupsI think you should hire a company who can properly validate credit cards. The data is on your end I have no clue how to tell Yahoo! how to do better fraud prevention.
I just want you to know and pass it on that I think its a bunch of crap. I have spent a lot of time promoting Yahoo Search Marketing on and offline following all of your guidelines and operating in full cooperation. I even just showcased your program at Blogworld in my presentation.
Please let me know by Friday what you decide to do with my account before I leave for Las Vegas Pubcon.
She promptly responded with:
On Nov 29, 2007, at 12:47 PM, Michelle Nakasone wrote:
Hi Jeremy,
We are going to hold off expiring your account. Let’s catch up after Pubcon.
Michelle
So now back after pubcon:
Hi Jeremy,
We performed another quality audit of your YSM sign ups and we are still receiving the same results. 65% of your YSM sign ups are fraudulent which is 10x more than the average affiliate in our program (coming through PID xxxxxx and xxxxxxxx). Unfortunately, we are going to have to end the relationship. Our partnership through CJ will expire in 7 days. Keep in mind that we do not believe you are intentionally generating the fraudulent sign ups. However, we can’t continue with this partnership as we are losing money.
Give me a call if you’d like to discuss further: xxx-xxx-xxxx
Thanks,
Michelle
I dont even know what to say… I was told last summer from a YSM person that I was in the top 3 of the Yahoo Search Marketing Program $$$ wise. In 2007 we had a few 5 figure months 10-18k promoting YSM.
I feel Yahoo! had many options here.
1) they could have assigned me a different account id.
2) they could have audited the traffic (well they say they don’t have that ability)
3) they could have talked to me at Pubcon about it
I guess it is their loss at the end of the day. Very simple traffic evaluation could have easily sniffed out what the cause of this was…. you don’t think we dealt with a metric shit ton of fraud with AuctionAds/eBay/CJ ? Does Yahoo! only have 1 developer guy with a clue? (Jeremy Zawodny) ??
Whatever.. another day
We know its not your fault but your still expired? WOW!
Its stuff like this why Yahoo will never overtake Google in the search marketing area.
I think CJ are as much to blame in this situation. 65% is way ttoo much to be accidental, somebody is obviously targeting you to try and get you booted, CJ should be able to filter those referrals (even if Yahoo can’t).
I agree with you - on one of my sites I use Cj and get tons of click throughs - the system is flawed
could it actually be the type of audience here? 65% of people trying to make money online are also trying their hardest to find the best scam. Seems pretty good to be able to sign up with a false cc - free!
Having said that though, considering how much money you’re making them, surely Yahoo could track down the offending IPs and block them.. or give you a new PID so that you can see if it is because someone has hijacked your PID.
Google pulls the same crap. I got booted from Google Adsense because they said a lot of my clicks were fraudulent even though I always abided by the terms and conditions. People I didn’t even know were clicking on the ads and ended up getting me booted.
There was no recourse with Google, and it looks like Yahoo is pulling the same crap.
I really am worried about that myself. Everyone that runs with Adsense should worry. How am I supposed to screen who is clicking my ads across the world? If someone has a vendetta - then what? I’m sure Google must have many levels of escalation that would have to be surpassed before they’d actually cancel an account, but who knows? They can’t exactly publish their algorithm for getting kicked out of the program. It couldn’t be just one guy clicking from iceland that gets my site cancelled, could it? Scary stuff…
I doubt that this would be the case with the adsense program. I have heard that adsense is pretty hardcore in instances where they think people are cheating and clicking on their own ads, but I think it has to be a pretty egregious offense. If some guy is trying sabotage you, I think there would be some kind of communication between you and google about what was going on. I think you would be able to defend yourself if you were in the right and reclaim your account.
well any program that runs like this obviously cant last long
I always find it odd that my impressions on my adsenses accounts are always a lot lower than my page loads and impressions on my stat counters
Communication? Google? You have got to be kidding me. At least Yahoo has human people responding to your messages. Yahoo even calls you if you’re in big trouble. I know people who got banned by Adsense, two of the guys were making over $10k/mo with it, and neither managed to even get through to a human being (they received constant bot responses only).
Actually, I was notified without any prior communication that my adsense account was terminated due to click fraud. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the click fraud did not originate within my organization. Some possiilities… if everyone in a specific business uses our website - which is the case - then hundreds of people could be generating clicks from the same IP address. Of course given that scenario, it would most definately be possible for someone to sabotage the account, regardless of what google says. It happened to us. And though it’s been several years since the action, I am still a bit bitter because it implied that we were dishonest and even after apealling, google replied “…after review we have determined that this is definately click fraud.” That’s arrogance and it proves that the system is flawed becuase it was not click fraud. Adsense was never a big source of income for us but it was the principle and the arrogance which disturbed me. With regards to both Yahoo! and google, remember that public perception is critical. If google can “determine” that 2,000 NON-PRODUCING accounts were involved in click fraud, they can report that they terminated 2,000 accounts for click fraud. Sounds great and it actually makes it seem as though they have some sort of grip on the problem - which they don’t. Same with Yahoo! If they can say “…we terminated a bunch of accounts - and look at this - not just meaningless non-producing accounts but one of our top three - we’re really doing a great job of detecting this stuff…” Click farud and credit card fraud are obviosuly different, but they both require action to maintain confidence in the product. If they can’t actually stop the problem, at least they can make it look like they are controlling it.
Nice Quality Control Yahoo!
what a bitch! geez you would think that with Yahoo Search Marketing being the only thing that can save them they would be nicer to one of there top affiliates.
she tried, but shoe left it up to her. he shoudl have proposed something like he did at the end of this post. i dont blame shoe, I think yahoo acted incompetent. shoe can just go make his moeny from someone else anyway.
you would think YAHOO would be on top of things especially when it is one of thier top marketers
SHOE do you think this is a result from the mybloglog stuff a while back still mad at you?
i dont think either are connected… the mybloglog thing was healed (i think) weeks after it happened
[...] Yahoo Search Marketing - ‘We Know We suck’ What Say You? [...]
It sounds like you are a bad guy who attracts a high percentage of bad people. At least that’s how the emails from Yahoo try to make it sound. They really have no tracking ability? I guess that would be consistent with a lot of their other lack of abilities.
ya it does… first time in many years with many affiliate programs I have ever been accused of that
strange when shoe blogged about my site we did a ton of money in sales and not 1 stolen credit card!
I still do not understand the part where they admit its their fault but are going to kick you out anyway?
[...] Read more of this article at ShoeMoney.com [...]
Sounds like google didn’t hire some discrete people that are not from a country that was never called USSR to not go YSM bowling on their top affiliates.
What I don’t understand is that even after you offered to have them discount the fraudulent sign ups from your account, Yahoo still didn’t try to keep you. That’s just poor customer service all the way around.
Sounds fishy to me and you would think Yahoo would try to do anything possible to keep the business relationship between you profitable for all parties involved considering the amount of traffic you can deliver.
Their whole advertising side seems a bit weird. They don’t seem to know what they are doing with anything. You would think with all the PHDs they would know a little something, or perhaps they just don’t have enough man-power. Either way, a multi-billion dollar company should know better.
Maybe he just found a weak link at the company. I bet he could elevate it to someone who is a little smarter.
I wasn’t just referring to YSM, but also YPN. I ran into trouble with them on the publisher side… they seemed very unprofessional.
Actually, I doubt it. This is exactly the type of conversation that I’ve had with everyone I’ve ever talked to at YSM. You’re always left just shaking your head.
Yahoo is messing up all over, they got that one guy in jail in china who now is getting tortured, they are on a bad path.. RIP yahoo
With so many of your readers coming from digitalpoint, are you really that surprised that you’re getting so many fraudulent referrals? Not that it’s your fault, and terming your account sucks, but any company with half a brain is going to stop paying someone if the referrals aren’t converting into positive income. You’d do exactly the same thing in their shoes…..shoes…get it? …..sorry
actually I would fix the problem. I have been in there shoes only worse. With AuctionAds we paid out net ZERO terms which meant that if there was any fraud we were stuck with the bill…
Typical MBA executives. You can only put an ad on your site, or promote their affiliate program in some way and send them traffic. After that, everything else is up to them.
Instead of cutting you off entirely, they should have put a system in place to identify whether a given account is valid or fraudlent within X days of that account signing up.
They then should take back and cancel those lead signups, and not pay you for them.
That way, they still get 35% of your valid sign-ups, rather than 0 sign-ups a month from you.
They could have even said we will only pay 3 months delayed.
Of course, if you are generating the fraudulent sign-ups yourself, then of course they should cut that affiliate off.
Wow I see there is no loyalty to top affiliates….Yahoo was in the wrong. Shoe what is your feeling about continuing a relationship with companies like this. For example Im alway getting my check late from one company [they do not do direct deposit]. Do you move on and never work with them again? Will you work with yahoo again down the road?
Alarming!
What the hell has happened to Yahoo. Somebody needs to put a tent on that circus.
Jeremy,
I wouldn’t get to uptight about the whole situation your doing to much promoting (positive) not to have any problems, just have to get it taken care of :).
[...] your account” to Shoemoney. There are several email responses listed on his site in regards to Yahoo Search Marketing - ‘We Know We suck’ in which Michelle tells Jeremy that his account has a 65% fraudulent charge rate, it is not your [...]
Newbie question. Is it possible, or even probable, that this is all generated from one or two bad apples?
I realize they haven’t told Shoe anything, but in general, does anyone know?
They can’t tell which url is behind business transactions they accept? Why does that scream “theres a buck to be made here”? I’m not implying getting stolen cards or anything, but theyre giving out fairly large commisions without being able to track?? I hope that gets fixed soon for Yahoo! sake…. before someone figures out how to take it to the bank. Get to work Shoe!
no doubt and with 15 programs in that 1 cookie ….
I agree i’m sure they are paying out a lot of money each month - I’m not nearly as advanced and I can tell where transactions are coming from on my site? If i can do it shouldnt yahoo be able to?
I had unpleasant dealings with YSM as well. One of my sites was generating around $700/month through them and they closed my account, pointing to a “low conversion rate”. I thought the point of CPC advertising was that it’s Cost Per CLICK. I’d have put CJ.com ads on the site if I wanted to earn on conversion. The point is that I would never deal with them again. They have no idea how to treat customers. I made just over $14k with Google last year and they sent me a Christmas gift, not accusations.
You got a Christmas gift from Google for $14k in a year? Hmm… wonder why I haven’t got anything from them.
As for Yahoo, I was there since the very, very beginning. I was one of the original 2,000 accepted, made a couple thousand a month from YPN. Then, they kicked me out for ‘low conversion rate’ as well… it was really just a generic email that they seemed to be sending everyone.
Fark that is a high number - 65%
At least we learn 1 important thing. Yahoo average fraud rate is about 6.5%. Good to know.
I understand where Yahoo is coming from with some of the issues with CJ’s interface….it only gives advertisers so much control over an account and the affiliates running that program under the account. Sometimes it can be a pain. It shouldn’t be that big of an issue to go in and invalidate these transactions if they have the order id though.
What a service are they delivering.
And nice touch by saying wait after Pubcun, because they know you’re gonna talk about them.
I said loose them and spread the word. I think there are other advertiser out there that are willing to step in to fill the gap that YSM left for your
Good luck
You’re still running their banner up on top?
Wow, idiotic way to do business and from a company that is big enough and been around long enough to know better. No wonder they are getting their asses kicked in so many areas. Can you say permanent beta! First they flat out suck with ad targeting for publishers then blame and ban them for not sending relevant traffic lol. Now this.
I’m kind of confused what that 65% is representing…is it referrals that are buying traffic with supposedly stolen cards or advertisers buying ads with bogus cards?
If it is publisher referrals my guess is it is a bunch of people, or just a couple really busy guys, using temp credit cards to sign up for new accounts just to get the free bonus credits (like those $100 codes), using up the credits and since it’s a temp credit card it won’t refill which maybe they are considering fraudulent cards? The once their free credit is up they are going to get another new account with another temp card…rinse and repeat. Would that explain it? Or am I just confused about what they are confused about lol?
That was my guess as well, all sorts of international signups coming from DP using shitty ass VCC’s bought in the buy & sell because they can’t get proper credit cards due to country or being a minor and whatnot.
I look for yahoo to eventually become more of a holding company, than an internet company
It sounds like the problem is that the CJ interface doesn’t give them the info they would need to address it.
I wonder that they don’t offer to take you on directly, given the amount of traffic you send them! Amazing!
I must say I’m quite surprised. So what do the others in the top three do ? I know there’s no point in tracking referrer data. In the event your ID has been circulated on some list, well you’ve already mentioned that (change the id on your account.). They could block offending IPs (though they’d be at that forever and a day).. at the end of the day they have JUST ONE ALTERNATIVE. There IS no way to mitigate client side. THEY have to do something about it.. from a business perspective, they’d be nuts not to take the cost effective approach.. in a nutshell, It’s obviously cheaper to ditch you. Prolly time to ditch them and move on to a program that gives a damn.
Hmm.. I think people are being a bit unfair on Yahoo actually. The mails sent were polite and clearly explained the situation. At the end of the day, 65% of the converting traffic was fraudulent and would end up costing Yahoo money. Of course they have to address the issue.
They said they can provide the referring URLs, but not tie specific URLs to the fraud. I don’t know what tracking CJ provide, but if this is the case, perhaps the real failure here was in Yahoo using CJ in the first place! But as Jeremy says - this site is where 100% of the traffic is coming from, I’m sure Yahoo would point out if there is traffic coming from any other sources. Jeremy, I don’t get why you didn’t pursue this and find out where else the traffic is coming from?
They’re obviously quite convinced that traffic from this site is the problem. No offence, I love the blog! But for whatever reason, it seems to have resulted in problems for Yahoo, and they have to knock that on the head - fair enough.
How would assigning a different account ID help? The traffic’s still coming from the same source. I don’t see what other option is open to them, other than ditching CJ so they can use better tracking elsewhere.
it’s understandable that they can’t continue to take a loss but their pathetic solution to every issue is to just ban the publishers even when much of the problems are directly related to their bad structure. It’s one thing to protect your profits but another to just continue to filter out people who are helping you make money just because you can’t figure out how to properly set up services. YPN is a pretty obvious example. There is nothing “contextual” about it when compared to companies that know what they are doing. And rather than fixing it the publishers get blamed and banned. Not the smartest solution. They are going to end up banning all their real publishers by the time they decide to get out of beta lol. Though considering how they have been doing things, maybe they shouldn’t ever come out of beta.
Being polite is nice and all… but you can say yes maam and no sir all you want as your twisting the knife in someone’s side and you know what? Polite doesn’t count for anything. Yahoo is grossly negligent for TRYING to do something in my opinion… I don’t care how polite they were… who cares?
http://www.digg.com/tech_news/Jeremy_Schoemaker_is_banished_from_Yahoo_Search_Marketing
Their actions are mute - stopping you from promoting their product is NOT going to stop their fraudulent sign ups.. the fraudsters will simply apply through another source..
This is so funny after reading your “Shoemoney’s a Drug Dealer” post.. even IF you were.. stopping one drug dealer is not going to stop the demand for that drug.. my 2 cents
they should’ve solved the problem asap.
Only something like this could happen to the Shoe. lol
the thing is he will probably make more off of this and the traffic that post generates than he did off the whole yahoo affiliate program - what a way to turn lemons into lemonaid
WOW. They expect you to know who is using a stolen credit card? I may be mistaken, but aren’t THEY the ones collecting the credit card information? How in the world would you be able to figure it out?
Yahoo sucks in more than one way. They should sell their biz to Google and go do something else because they no longer seem to know what they are doing.
That’s just crazy!
Think they need to get their act together or shut up shop, as they seem not to have a clue on this one.
Obviously someone is targeting you and Yahoo of all people should be able to figure that out. Duhh!
Just absolutely WOW! That is unbelievable to me. A Mickey Mouse operation is right. Even The Mouse himself would be disgusted. They are looking at a big loss and, after this gets out, Yahoo may as well hide under the covers if they’re not too busy with damage control.
so amazingly crappy
All i have to say is Yahoo still does not filter US from non us traffic.. so it doesn’t surprise me that they cant filter credit card fraud i mean how hard is it to filter Ip addresses…. Google does it well so does MSN …. but yet Y! cant for some reason.
That is incredibly lame.
Oh well, their loss.
I work for a mid-size company that takes 100% of its orders online with credit cards. We successfully weed out 99% of fraudulent sign-ups. It seems unacceptable that a multi-billion dollar company like Yahoo! can’t keep out the frauds. WTF?
I think the problem is they go through CJ
So much fraud and scamming the system. Google represents the peak of this trend, and AdSense represents this moment in time. If click fraud can’t be ultimately brought under control, then it pushes enormous pressure on the marketmakers to respond somehow. The little guy (shoemoney, etc.) gets tossed out. Why? Ultimately, how many made for revenue sites with crappy content and where the main focus is figuring out how to maximize affiliate/adsense revenue? I don’t blame them..it’s worked thus far.. But it won’t forever.
As marketing technology continues to improve, better targeting engines and modeling will allow for better ROI from display ads on higher profile (read: higher credibility with advertisers) sites.
I’m sick of the SEM world, with everyone from the Millenial generation rushing to get their piece of the action. Such a model will collapse under its own weight.
I’m not saying that Shoemoney is scamming anyone personally; however, it’s a big club of folks trying to ‘pay the bills’ which could attract less than legitimate customers for the products he’s advertising, and more sympathizers to his cause.
65% is so unbelievably high that it has to be intentional. Someone is targeting you.
I can’t come to any other conclusion.
Still, even a standard “out of the box” merchant gateway will stop 98%+ of stolen cards. I can’t believe Yahoo is for real…
I agree. Google banned my AdSense account because a person with a vendetta clicked my ads repeatedly. I got no warning, no Michelle, no phone number and no response to emails.
At least Yahoo provides some level of customer service.
I think someone at Yahoo is gonna get fired!
They couldn’t expect you to keep quiet about this. The bad PR from this is going to hit them a lot harder than the bad credit cards, especially when it seems it is there problem not yours.
I suggest everyone shows their support to Shoe with their feet and leave YSM to their own downfall.
Good on you Shoe for exposing this.
J
These type of problems tend to happen a lot towards big blogs. The reason for this is because with the huge amount of visitors, some are bound to mess things up.
-Mike
[...] we thought it was worth mentioning that Shoemoney has been having a hell of a time with the Yahoo Search Marketing department lately as they’ve canceled his YSM affiliate account over at CJ. His post illustrates just [...]
Shoe, how come the Yahoo Search Marketing creative is still running?
Yeah Jeremy, How come the Yahoo creative still running ?
Maybe this was a link bait to get more YSM referrals!
Hahahha.
You would think that if they had a top 5 publisher having 65% fraudulance that they would sit down in a meeting with their top 10 accounts and figure out what the issue was. The only way Yahoo! is going to compete with anyone, let alone Google, is to make their system better, which cleary they aren’t doing. Now instead of trying to rectify the problem, they’ve given you (shoe) a reason to post an article that will be read by thousands of webmasters and bloggers currently earning with Yahoo! or considering Yahoo! as a possible affiliate program, which will in turn only manage to loose more potential customers for Yahoo!. Really poor customer planning and service there. And I find it completely absurd that they do not have enough data to determine offending PID’s or urls. Very interesting post, one I will look forward to hearing more on as I continue to research Yahoo! as a possible resource - although after reading this post they have fallen WAY down on my list of potentials.
Keep up the good work shoe!
To me it sounds like whatever person at Yahoo be it Michelle or whoever manages the traffic stream Shoe sends just don’t know their head from their ass. I can’t believe Yahoo doesn’t have the tools to handle this. It’s just some jackass at Yahoo that doesn’t know how to use them. Sounds like someones job/paycheck at Yahoo is on the line and they don’t know hwo to fix it so they are giving Shoe the boot instead. Also sounds like some smart bastard that doesn’t like Shoe or is jealous is behind this.
Yahoo doesn’t know where their traffic is coming from?? Wow, they are ripe for fraud. No wonder this is happening!
I’m sorry, but this is another distastful marketing bit by Yahoo. First of all, knowing your influence, did they think you would just shut up about it and not make fools out of themselves with a post like this? Now I’m not sure how much money they were actually losing off your affiliates, but doesn’t bad publicity mean more loss in the long run?
I talked to a well known SEO recently and he had the same view on Yahoo…they know shit about marketing. I’m surprised they still have 30% of the SE pie.
Oh and maybe it’s another linkbait bit from Jeremy (I hope it is, if it’s real that you got kicked out of YSM all your work will be cut out from underneath you
).
I think this is just to show one of the MANY major reasons why Yahoo is falling to the wayside and Google is taking over every aspect. If you can’t evolve with the times and provide quality service then people are going to go elsewhere and I think this is what is happening. People are sick of Yahoo and their sub par services when you can go with Google and other companies that provide you with not only better service but with more money.
un-friggin-believable. Thanks for the heads up on this. I have been in the internet marketing arena for a relatively short period of time and wow…this is an eye opener! Sheese…The quality control should be on their end of this. It will be interesting to see if they move forward to update their policy. Until then, we’ll all be watching.
Sounds to me like it’s just an excuse to get rid of you for some reason.
Damn that really dont sound good Yahoo is very restricted as I see.
@ Shoemoney….
Do you actually believe those figures (65%) AND have they proved it?
With the amount of credit card fraud that must involve surely there is a case for you to offer up some kind of investigation - you could bring down the mob!!
and what are you going to focus on next?
regards
James.
This proves what i’ve been saying for a long time - and i’m surprised that others havn’t realized it sooner:
YAHOO IS RUN BY A BUNCH OF IDIOTS..
There really is no other explanation.