According to a Press Release today Cyberplex Inc. (TSX:CX), subsidiary, Tsavo Media will have to repay Yahoo! approximately $4.8 million over a reasonable time period” for sending low quality traffic to Yahoo advertisers.
“Yahoo! is retroactively charging Tsavo for what Yahoo! is now saying was actually low quality traffic, ranging back over many months during 2011.”
“While the Company and Yahoo! remain in discussions on this issue, the Company now expects that Yahoo! will enforce its decision to charge back this amount citing its right to do so pursuant to the terms of Tsavo Media’s agreement with Yahoo!.”
“Cyberplex also announced today that its President, Ted Hastings, has provided his resignation.”
According to TechCrunch.com, Tsavo Media operates a network of roughly 300 websites and blogs which generated the traffic.
“‘The company’s network of Internet publications includes crappy websites like LumaGardening.com, ThinkFashion, TechSerious, WealthyGeek, Twirlit, DiscoverFame and KidGlue.””
Poor Yahoo. They implemented the notorious ‘TQ’ score and thus tagging legitimate traffic as of no quality, their stock hovers just above $15 from a tenfold high – so now they claw back payments for traffic. I would not trust a PPC provider that uses Yahoo for ad streaming.
Wow. They generated $4.8 million dollars from Yahoo over “many months” in 2011? How?
I just researched their top properties and none of them have any traffic to speak of. (Using Alexa as my guide.)
Multiply mediocre traffic X 300 and you still don’t have anywhere near that kind of ad revenue.
I’d bet the TQ score caught some shenanigans going on behind the curtain.
Who said click fraud was a problem?
Chris – TQ score supposedly tags traffic as it happens, not a year later, so no payments are issued. This is a case of clawing back payments. As far as TQ is concerned, it classified entire TLDs such as .biz, .info and .us as “second tier”. In other words, Yahoo paid less if clicks were made on such TLDs. It even went further and paid less for domains related to alcohol, guns and ammo, or whatever “controversial” content. To a large extent, Yahoo is responsible for the fall of Parked.com that used its ad stream; people walked away from Parked.com once payments plummeted.
@Acro – Thank you for the insight.
Tsavo is all about arbitrage. They think they can build a legitimate business by flipping traffic and targeting key words. A complete scam.
@Yahoo! has it going on.
Hands-On With Yahoo’s App Search – Beating Google At Their Own Game?
http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/02/06/hands-on-with-yahoo-app-search
Not sure what these guys did or did not do, but Yahoo mostly destroyed all its partnerships and deep, long-lasting relationships that had been developed over a decade, either directly with them or with their trusted partners.
After this, Bing.com (Microsoft) showed up and decided to literally decimate the parking industry. They stomped out every single remaining partner Yahoo ever had. I can’t think of one single entity besides WhyPark that still is doing business with them. Anyone? Can someone name one other company?
How stupid of both Yahoo and Microsoft. They just gave all our valuable traffic to Google, or elsewhere now as it is going all over the place and will never come back to Yahoo or Bing the same way it did years ago.
Just stupid of both of them.
@ Chris. Don’t use Alexa for stats. If you’re going to use anything IMO it should be Google Ad Planner (when possible) and Compete.com. Alexa is one of the most easily gamed web metrics out there. Tsavo has a very interesting history, you can go far into the rabbit hole to get even more interesting facts.
What boggles the mind is how long the chicken-salad-from-chicken-shit party lasted. Even more amazing is how many bullshit content farmers have yet to be shown the door and still draw a paycheck.
Amusing to watch all the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the little piggies, as the teat runs dry.
On the short end of the stick are not only the business owners who are desperate to buy credible, converting leads (yet keep getting fed swill), but the owners of geniunely good traffic sources- undeveloped generic domain names, developed and credible info portals, etc- who are categorized right along with the bullshit artists.
Of course, domainers as a group aren’t exactly blameless.
It sure was easy to send all that ‘non performing’ generic type in traffic over to your http://www.TriggersHighPayingAdContent.whatever and garbitrage your way to the promised land. Oh yeah, and those parking ad-streams were generated ‘at random’. LMAO.
… and now laying in state, as a rotting corpse along the side of the road, are owners of developed, generic keyword domains on ‘second tier’ TLDs, their souls wandering aimlessly in Affiliate Marketing Purgatory.
You cannot make an industry on bullshit. You can generate a temporary payday with bullshit, but you cannot build an entire industry on it. As it stands, the fictitious web industries have been falling out of the sky for the better part of two years, with the bottom just now getting in site. All you bullshit artists, hope you’ve said your prayers. You’re long past terminal velocity and are about to get well acquainted with a hard landing. Of course, none of this applies to those wearing the golden parachutes, stitched together via the come-lately resurgence of IPO money. Soooooo fucking amazing THAT lesson was forgotten inside of a decade. As the great quote goes… “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”
The good news is, there’s still a dash of opportunity yet, but the monkeys and dogma chanters will miss it for sure; it’s only available to the smart and hungry. Get ready to be brave, my brothers. Whether you realize it or not, we’ve been generally reliving 2000/1 for the past couple years.
The kingmaker era has passed, but you might still have a shot at becoming a potentate.
Well said, @12345-678910-11-12! If I didn’t feel like I drank of the Kool Aid at the last gasp of terminal velocity, I couldn’t empathize. Great video – a blast from the past! Thanx.
Is that what certain top domainers have been up to, then? The resurgence of certain kind of $$?
Now, to get back to plan A.
@T1D: Noted! and thanks!