Two years ago, Yahoo yanked adult products and banner ads from its home American portal following protests. That was then, this is now: buying Overture Services in October has led to Yahoo returning to selling ads to what the San Francisco Chronicle called "a range of hardcore Websites," ads showing up on two Overture-owned search engines, AltaVista and AlltheWeb.
"Our intention," said a Yahoo spokeswoman to the Chronicle, "is to ensure that consumer interests are best served and that consumers, advertisers and partners benefit from the highest quality online experience. We evaluate the external environment of our various businesses, as well as our practices, on an ongoing basis." The paper said she declined explicit comment on Yahoo returning to adult advertising.
The ads do not appear on Yahoo itself, the paper added, Yahoo continuing to keep them off the master portal to maintain its mainstream image. The ads appear instead, the paper said, "only on what are relatively small Websites that few Internet users identify with Yahoo. The ads are also exported to Web sites outside the Yahoo family such as InfoSpace, which owns its own branded search engine, plus Dogpile and Metacrawler."
"Does Yahoo miss the cash it once made from adult online business?" asked RatedHot owner Marsha Youngs. "Or has it decided to accept the fact that it's out there and some do want to see it?"
Overture and the AltaVista and AlltheWeb search engines had done business with adult well before Yahoo bought Overture for $1.8 billion in October, the Chronicle said. Yahoo itself banned most adult materials and ads from its master portal after protests by groups like the American Family Association, which helped bring the issue to a head, the paper added, when Yahoo added an adult shopping category.
But Yahoo at the same time took "modest steps against pornography posted" by Yahoo Groups message board users, the Chronicle continued, making it more difficult to find adult-oriented groups by yanking them off the Yahoo Groups directory, without eliminating the groups themselves or cracking down on their content.
