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MyBlogLog Widget Tracks Your AdSense Clicks
Written By Mike on Feb. 24, 2007.
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This is just freaking insane. Now it finally makes sense (kinda) why Yahoo would spend millions of dollars to acquire MyBlogLog -- it's because they instantly grabbed access to stats on every MBL user's AdSense stats including click-throughs and presumably the content that cause a particular AdSense ad to be displayed, aka, part of how Google computes what ads to display, where, which is what Yahoo always had trouble with.
I don't use MBL but I'm glad I don't now, I don't want that personal information in the hands of some random company. For all I know they have a massive database on their servers that figures out how much money each MBL widget person makes on AdSense and then could use that (coupled with the email address you use to signup for MBL) to sell your email address to Yahoo Publisher Network customers looking to score with AdSense publishers.
How incredibly shady of Yahoo, I'm disgusted.
kristin
Written Feb. 24, 2007 / Report /
Icky. I have an account but I never put anything on my website. I'm glad I didn't!
bbenzinger
Written Feb. 24, 2007 / Report /
Personally, I don't mind too much. But I've been using MyBlogLog for almost two years and they have always been tracking ad clicks (Yes, this is way before they started doing any of this social networking stuff - back when it was just a plain click tracking service). So do a lot of other click tracking services (seriously, it's a popular feature to track ad clicks and can be found in almost all major solutions). Even Google can probably filter out clicks on YPN ads in Analytics data. I've even come across scripts online that people use to track YPN clicks on Google Analytics (though you set that up yourself, of course).
For those of you wondering where you find these stats, they've always been visible in your statistics section: What Readers Clicked -> Ads. (Update: just noticed this is for Pro users only, which I happen to be). It's nice, though the click counts seem to be higher than actual reports in Google Adsense.
I do however agree with you that it's a bit shady of Yahoo not disclosing this. Slipped my mind too - I was just happy to see that MyBlogLog got acquired. But in MyBlogLog's defence, they've always been tracking these stats as requested and it's always been told on their site that they do. Common practice in click tracking.
Oli
Written Feb. 27, 2007 / Report /
I didn't know this was news or I would have blogged it when I noticed it, the day after I put the tracking code on my blog.
What's the issue here? The reason I put the code on my site wasn't to create some sort of avatar-anarchy on my sidebar but to see what people were doing.
All the code does is add a hook to every link on the page that triggers onclick and sends the data off the the MBL servers before the browser actions the request. It's been doing this since before Yahoo bought them -- they didn't hire evil scientists to conjure up some fiendish system to spy on adsense blocks.
Moreover, Google Analytics does the same damned thing but nobody seems to care if Google are finding out more about how people use your site...
Re the reporting: Over time I've seen that reported stats on adsense clicks are roughly double what google says. I'd wager that it's an issue with MBL than adsense, but I can't be sure.
I'm not sure I understand why you're so shocked, though, Mike. Every single internet company that has anything to do with marketing and advertising would do this if they could. Google and Yahoo can. I don't see an issue.