Yahoo! will no longer accept advertising from online gambling merchants, the Internet portal decided last week.
The company based its decision on the same factors that it uses to make all business decisions, said spokeswoman Nissa Anklesaria.
"Basically, as with all of our businesses, we continually evaluate them, how they relate to overall quality of user experience, and consistency of the Yahoo! brand, and the global brand strategy as well as our recent and not-so-recent overall company-wide focus on long-term profitability and growth, and we made the decision that it was not a business that we were going to be in," she said.
Anklesaria said she does not know what percentage of the advertisements on Yahoo! were for online betting sites.
The decision was made early last week, she said, and had nothing to do with the announcement from eBay that as soon as its acquisition of PayPal is complete, the person-to-person payment processor will no longer transact gambling payments.
Yahoo! offers a service that is similar to PayPal's. Called PayDirect, the service allows for P2P payments. Unlike PayPal, PayDirect has never allowed itself to be used for gambling transactions.
"The terms of service on Yahoo! PayDirect have now and have always explicitly forbidden PayDirect to be used on online casino transactions," she said.
Additionally, a situation rumored to be brewing between Yahoo! and Google could have further implications for the placement of online casino advertising on Web portals. In an article published July 11, The Economist reported that Yahoo! might be interested in acquiring Google, a popular search engine. If the deal goes through, Yahoo!'s ban on I-gaming ads could stretch to Google as well.