Hey Yahoo, You’re Optimizing the Wrong Thing

"Chief scientist" is absolutely a real job. Why would you think it's not?

People that work in "ad operations" usually do that work by performing A/B tests etc. To me, it is a very unglamorous step child to a data scientist.

> I'm not sure what your end point here is, as it's all over the map, but you seems to simultaneously be arguing against the author's point and for it as well.

Sometimes the truth doesn't entirely support or undermine someone's argument. It's one of the sure signs that it is the truth. ;-)

I wasn't trying to make a specific point, but rather to inform everyone, since the article didn't.

I don't mean to be coy, so I'll share my opinion:

The article presents this as a bug, which implies it is clearly wrong. It isn't. Misclicks are always going to create undesired outcomes. If you didn't have an ad there, the misclick would trigger some other action. Showing an ad landing page is probably one of the least harmful things you could reasonably do with a click in that location, so I question the notion that this leads to a "terrible experience". It might not be a great experience, but unless Yahoo Mail is expected to fix mice and operating systems, it's probably one of the better experiences they could provide in response to a misclick.

Ms. Mason seems to believe that the false clicks are driving Yahoo to think that they are getting superior ad performance. That isn't the case, as the data itself does indeed provide some clues as to the relative likelihood that an ad received a misclick.

The notion that this is evidence of "the data only takes us so far, and creativity and clear thinking are always required to find the best solutions" isn't well supported by this problem. In reality, clear thinking about the data itself has indeed lead to about as good a solution as Yahoo Mail could provide.

I think the notion that poor product design can evolve from abuse of data is an interesting discussion, but unfortunately a) it probably isn't poor product design (what function would you put in the areas of the screen most likely to suffer a misclick?) and b) not at all likely due to optimizing click-throughs. Ironically, the misclick problem is a well known issue in online advertising, and the best way to mitigate it is to use the data to dampen the noise.

There are obviously a number of ad revenue driven pressures on Yahoo Mail's design. The display advertising market is very different from the search engine market. It is only tangentially about the clicks. The biggest pressures are:

"Premium Locations": these aren't necessarily the places that get high click throughs, but rather the locations which are prominently displayed and noticed by the users, which causes them to stand out in a world awash in banner ads. This competes with good UI design, which wants to put important functions in these exact same locations.

"CPM": just getting way higher impression counts. This translates to filling the screen with as many ads as possible, stealing screen real estate and really disrupting eye flow.

"CPA": Lots of ad networks/DSP's try to arbitrage between CPM and CPA. Misclicks don't generally help much with that beyond hindering optimization efforts to use clicks as signals. Mostly what this does to design is encourage "rest points" in applications where users are likely to actually take the time to go all the way through to a conversion (think of it like TV commercial breaks in sports).

"Uniques/F-Cap": You want to raise the bar on the minimum # of impressions seen by every visitor, because those early impressions are far more likely to be people who haven't seen the ad before. Advertisers pay a lot more (10x more is not unheard of) for that. So, there is pressure to spam the visitor with as many impressions as possible before they are likely to leave (which makes it hard to serve ads in a way that is proportional to the value the user derives from the experience).

"View based conversion": The underbelly of the adverting network. In theory this is a good thing. In practice, it creates an incentive to shove ad locations in to the page that the visitor never even notices (ironically the opposite of the problem the article contends).

Some people have apparently gotten the impression I was questioning your credentials, your intelligence, or somehow attacking you personally. At least in terms of intent it couldn't be farther from the truth! While I think your naïveté about online advertising undermines your article, all it might imply about you personally is your curiosity about online advertising is low as compared to other pursuits. If anything, I'd say that is a compliment. If I conveyed or you perceived anything other than that, I certainly apologize.

First: it may not be quite so apparent from the screen shot, but the ad is framed to make it distinct form the rest of the app. Going further might well do more harm than good, as it could disrupt sight lines and make the UI garish regardless of ad content. The ad itself also draws distinction with the surrounding widgets by employing a different font, a different icon style, a different background, and a different icon size.

As the article describes, people aren't misclicking because they've looked closely at the ad and mistaken it for an application function. Misclicks are predominantly people who really aren't sure what they are clicking on, don't know they are clicking, and/or didn't intend to click at all.

Either way, in practice Yahoo's optimization efforts if anything create incentive to minimize misclicks, not the other way around.