Fallen internet giant Yahoo! is trying to lure users to its web search engine with clickbait ads posing as story snippets, promising, but never delivering, amazing car lease deals on Facebook.
Yahoo!, which along with AOL is a Verizon subsidiary called “Oath”, is facing turbulent times – who can forget the epic security breach, but the once all-powerful web portal is hitting new lows with some of their Facebook postings – sponsored or not.
While going through Facebook’s news feed, we were presented with a sponsored post titled “These Lease Deals Will Make You Consider Upgrading Your Ride” adorned with the picture of a BMW i8. Curiosity got the best of us and we clicked to find out what exactly those deals were only to be forwarded to… Yahoo!’s search results page for “best luxury car lease deals”.
More diligent users will probably notice that the “post” does mention “best deals on Yahoo Search“, but we all know that’s just there to cover face.
Some of you might be thinking that perhaps it was a human mistake or AI machine error. Well, we would have given them the benefit of the doubt if it wasn’t for the fact that we found at least two more posts from July and August this year, with similar clickbait titles and text going straight to – you machine-guessed it, Yahoo!’s search pages.
Way to #BuildYourBrand and trust among users, Yahoo!