Yahoo Ads login

Yahoo

Yahoo is placing far fewer ads on a highly-trafficked page—the screen it shows users when they log in to a Yahoo service.

That's according to Macquarie Equities Research, which put out a report this morning noting that sell-through on the page had declined from 86 percent last year to 47 percent in the fourth quarter of this year.

Yahoo started selling ads on its login pages in 2010. ComScore estimated they got 26 million visitors a day at the time.

You know what we think?

Yahoo should stop selling ads on that page as soon as possible.

When CEO Marissa Mayer was an executive at Google, she was a ferocious study of user behavior. While some designers objected to her data-driven approach for visual page elements, she was right on the money about less-visible issues that interfered with usage of a page, like slow page loads.

When a user goes to a login page, the goal should be to get them to log in as fast as humanly possible. Logged-in users are far more valuable to Yahoo than logged-out users, since they can track information about them far more accurately.

An advertiser, of course, wants them to spend time on the page and absorb their message.