A second lawsuit has been filed alleging that Yahoo is using spyware to distribute pay-per-click ads.
The suit, filed by dating service Metrodate.com in a California federal court, charges that Yahoo’s advertising network and unspecified third parties knowingly served ads to Web sites that rely heavily on spyware and adware to generate traffic. The suit also says Yahoo served ads to “typosquatting” sites—Web sites whose URLs scramble a few letters of well-known Web addresses to capture mostly unintentional traffic.
Metrodate charges that the clicks produced by serving ads to these sites are far inferior to those on the rest of yahoo’s network of publishing sites. The Metrodate lawsuit seeks compensatory damages, restitution for click fraud, and court costs.
A similar suit against Yahoo! was filed in a New Jersey court last Monday by Crafts by Veronica. Both suits allege that Yahoo! turned a blind eye to abuses on its pay-per-click network and even purposely increased the volume of “improper advertising” in order to meet investors’ ad revenue expectations.
The suits come about a month after anti-spyware activist and lawyer Ben Edelman released a report tracing what he described as a click-fraud link from spyware and adware distributors to Yahoo!’s performance-ad program. Edelman is named as counsel for the plaintiffs in both suits, which are trying for class-action status.
