Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing

As someone who has been in the belly of the beast, I'm going to try to summarize the various ways that this article is getting it wrong.

* Most Yahoo Mail ads generate revenue based on impressions, not clicks. So Yahoo isn't directly making more money by grabbing these "random" clicks.

* Where clicks do matter, major ad platforms including Yahoo throw away a LOT of clicks as fraud, and accidental clicks tend to disproportionately get thrown out along with them.

* In general, random clicks are considered a real PITA for major ad networks, as they confuse the heck out of ad optimization. While small players do tend to soak up that revenue, the big players really, really hate the phenomenon because it makes them far less efficient.

* It turns out what most impacts ad effectiveness online is whether people actually see the ad. An incredibly number of ads are just never seen by the audience. As a consequence, a good publisher will try to find locations for their ads that are highly visible. Highly visible and likely to evoke accidental clicks are, unfortunately, highly correlated.

* Most advertisers who are paying per click are very performance driven. They look at ROI, which means they look at conversion rates. When you charge an accidental click, it's almost certainly not going to convert, so in the end you look worse and they pay less for your clicks.

* One unfortunate bit of truth: advertisers do pay too much attention to clicks and CTR (click through rate). Even advertisers doing brand awareness campaigns, which are not looking for immediate response from their audience, tend to look at CTR.

* Yahoo has actually tried hard to establish other metrics that they should look at, like "Bounce Rate", which attempts to factor in whether visitors immediately exit after clicking. They use those metrics internally for optimizing ad performance, so accidental clicks are likely to discourage showing an ad more than encourage it.

"Decent" for whom? For you, maybe, because your motor skills are sharp. For those whose aren't, maybe not so much.

Are we to ascertain the shakiness level of the user to determine the proper amount of white space? A CSS media query maybe? ...But then, I'm just being rude here, sorry.

Yes, you are. Degraded/impaired motor skills aren't just something older people deal with, they come with a range of illnesses and disabilities too. Snarking about a media query for "shakiness" is sort of like a retail store owner snarking about whether he needs to put a camera on his store door to check if people using the ramp are really in wheelchairs.

There's even an intended barrier between the two in the form of a horizontal rule.. I don't understand how one can predict behaviors of people who do not fully read what they are clicking on.

These comments indicate that you don't really understand the problem we're talking about here. It's not that the user doesn't know the ad link is a different link. It's that she tries to click the link she wants but ends up clicking the ad link accidentally because the close placement of the two links makes it easy for a bump on a trackpad to send a click intended for link A skidding over to link B instead.