[ColinWright]

To be fair, it's not clear that Hilary Mason is specifically knowledgeable about on-line advertising. She is undoubtedly very knowledgeable about computer science, big data, and a number of fields in general, but it's possible her major interaction with the specifics of on-line advertising are as an advertisee, either directly or by proxy.

[hmason]

To be clear, I'm not knowledgeable about online advertising. I do understand that the incentives of the advertisers and the users are often opposed, but I was highlighting this as an example of poor product design likely due to optimizing click-throughs, not product experience. :)

[cbsmith]

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.