The Plot To Kill Yahoo

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October 10th, 2007 by Click Consult

Although the two rogue twentysomethings from America would like to remain anonymous, they still occasionally surface on the internet under their pseudonyms, Larry and Serge. Their fiendish plan to bring down the old Yahoo Overture may have narrowly failed, but it is rumoured to have made the two ex-college students millionaires.

Larry and Serge’s plan relied on word-of-mouth wildfire amongst their peers and the exponential, ‘snowballing’ effect that only the internet could provide. At the age of 19 and still in his first year of college, Larry paid Serge $35 dollars to build a plain, elementary ‘Fortune Cookie’ website. Supposedly drunk at the time, Larry requested an informative website that detailed the complete history of the Fortune Cookie. With his own credit cards and an untouched student loan, Larry began to advertise his website on the old Yahoo Overture platform (now known as Yahoo Panama). Larry never bothered to promote his amateur-looking website under apt keywords like “Fortune Cookies”. His first ad group contained one keyword: “the meaning of life.” The single, surprisingly high traffic keyword triggered just one ad text that repeated the words “Fortune Cookies Rule” over and over.

To begin with, the Pay-Per-Click campaign was a meaningless prank. But then Larry and Serge encouraged their college friends to open Yahoo accounts of their own. They told their friends to choose whatever keyword they wanted. T-shirts, DVDs, Used Cars, Hotels … there was only one condition: Copy their ad text word for word and direct all clicks to their fortune cookie website. As Yahoo Overture was based solely on a bid landscape and cost-per-click (CPC) was the only factor that determined ad ranking, the now infamous fortune cookie ad would appear for t-shirt, DVD, used car and hotel searches results as long as the CPC was high enough. As they approached their fourth and final year of college, Larry and Serge’s friends (and their friends and their friends) had opened their 1000th Yahoo account. With a countless number of keywords in these accounts, Yahoo was beginning to sit up and take notice as hundreds and hundreds of their search results were being polluted and rendered useless.

In March 2005, the game was up. After spreading across 22 states, Senior Yahoo Executives were finally alerted to Larry and Serge’s scheme. Yahoo were thought to have incurred significant legal costs, but they managed to shut down the fortune cookie website a mere three weeks after discovering it. On the day it was taken offline, Larry and Serge’s website was getting close to half a million hits per day. The website had changed a great deal since its humble, $35 beginnings. For one thing, it contained dozens of slick new webpages, all of which were awash with lucrative image and banner ads. Lured by the high traffic volumes, it seemed that many large corporations just had to have their ads on this very popular website. Larry and Serge had previously reinvested the money from these ads into new Yahoo accounts. However, no one knows how much money was spent on new PPC ads and how much money went to their bank accounts.

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