First, yes I know you are never to click on your own ads. With over 40 sites, mistakes happen. When I first started with adsense about a year ago, I had it happen once and immediately sent an email to adsense explaining what had happened, gave them the site, url, and exact time it happened to make sure I didn't receive credit for the click. I received a rather rude response from google telling me that I am never ever to click on my own ads (duh) and that it is a TOS violation. I am so careful that I have formed the habit of not even clicking on other sites ads I have an interest in. Anyway, yesterday I was being lazy and tried to copy a YPN URL to ad to my block list and an accidental click happened again. Within 30 seconds I had sent an email to yahoo telling them and giving them all the information. I know they can tell, but I still wanted to report it. This is the response I received from Yahoo: "We appreciate your honesty in reporting the click which you did on your listing. However, please note that we have a system in place which will automatically filter out the click charges for any clicks which Publisher Network advertisers do on their own listings." What a difference between the google response and the yahoo customer service response.
Haha that is pretty nice and does make for a less tense environment. Although the funny thing is google does the same thing.. I just think they take their stance intentionally to keep people from getting any bright ideas. People who get suspended from adsense for clicking on their own ads are not the guys who do it as themselves. There are other factors in play.
I was actually called yesterday afternoon by a rep from YPN, welcoming me to the Beta program and asking for my suggestions to make it better. I was speechless for a couple of seconds. Yahoo definitely appears to making a huge effort to work with their publishers instead of creating an adversial relationship. It was a pleasent surprise to say the least.
Kudos to YPN for handling inadvertent clicks in a common sense manner. I think that YPN is on their way to building a program that will be very popular with all kinds of web developers. And thanks for posting this. I know that a lot of YPN publishers will be very pleased to read this thread. AmCy
I reported a similar incident back in September. This is the response I got: It kind of makes me think that they have actual customer support reps who care. They don't seem to use the same old canned responses google uses for everything. I'm very happy with YPN so far (besides the common relevancy gripes)
Sweet!! I did the same thing about a month ago and in there reply, they replied to the other issue and didn't even mention the click!!! Looks like Yahoo has a better anti-fraud system that Google...use cookies/IP address. Google, you reading this??!!!!