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: High Umm 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 Signups Well 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 Signups I 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