> 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.