Clarification on Yahoo’s exclusivity clause

A few days ago, Dadscape pointed out to me that Yahoo Ads terms of service state:

For any webpage or RSS feed that includes the Ad Code, you agree not to display or link to any other advertising (including but not limited to any listing) that is mapped to or responds to the content of the Ad Page.

AdBrite, CrispAds and others like them are not “mapped to” the content: they don’t serve up ads that relate to what’s on your page. They serve up ads in the categories you choose – which can, actually, have nothing to do with your site. But the clause says “including but not limited to”, so I wrote to Yahoo for clarification. Here’s the relevant part of their response email:

“In response to your inquiry about displaying other ads that are non-contextual ads as well as Yahoo! Ads, this is permissible. We only as that you do not use other contextual ads on the same URL, at the same time.”

So make sure you know the difference between category-based ppc, and ppc ads which actually detect and reflect your content before using them alongside Yahoo. By the way, this is the same response I got from Google when I wrote them a while back about using AdSense with AdBrite and CrispAds.

1. Final word on Yahoo
2. Yahoo update
3. Yahoo! Publisher Beta Testing
4. Yahoo! Publisher Beta Testing
5. Yahoo’s “robots-nocontent” class tag

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