Punctilious Punctuation

When Adding up Characters in Your Ad Descriptions, Spaces and Punctuation Count

Last week, you may recall, we announced that short descriptions for your ads (70 characters or fewer) will be required starting in May, while long descriptions (up to 190 characters), will be optional. To reiterate, we will begin “truncating,” or cutting off, descriptions at the nearest complete word to 70 characters, followed by an ellipsis (”…”), in Yahoo! Sponsored Search results starting in June.

When we made this announcement, one savvy blog reader, Bob, asked: “Regarding the number of characters, do spaces between words count as characters?”

The short answer is: “Yes, Bob.”

Spaces, as well as periods, question marks, colons, semi-colons, ampersands, exclamation points, quotes (including “scare quotes”), commas, apostrophes, dashes, dollar signs, brackets, asterisks and all other symbols and forms of punctuation count as characters, except for the ellipsis mentioned above.

If your short description goes longer than 70 characters come mid-June, it will be trunacated (at the nearest complete word, mind you) but our system will add the ellipsis after that word. Should you, on the other hand, add an ellipsis on your own, for whatever reason, that will count as three characters.

We all know what punctuation looks like —”!, ?, :, $,” etc.—but it takes a humorist of considerable talent to tell us what it sounds like. The late Danish comedian and classical pianist, Victor Borge came up with a system of phonetic punctuation, a routine for which he became world famous.

—Michael Mattis

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11 Comments Add your own

1. Chris Thompson | April 17th, 2007 at 9:06 am

An ellipsis counts as three characters? What about a proper ellipsis, the … HTML character? I’ve never tried that one in particular, but other characters seem to work just fine and only subtract a single character from your count.
2. Melissa | April 17th, 2007 at 9:37 am

And if you use a % sign and try to put a comma after it, it doesn’t work - Yahoo leaves off the comma. Why is that?!?
3. Brent | April 18th, 2007 at 5:18 am

I have notice a “too long description” error message when I try and save my ads when the short description is exactly 70 characters. Is there going to be a fix for this?
4. Stephen | April 20th, 2007 at 9:36 am

Brent- take note: Yahoo automatically ads periods which the other guys don’t do.

I’ve had the same problem as you before and the solution was given to enter the ad copy in the long description instead.

Now with the change I’m going to need to find another solution or keep complaining to Yahoo that the punctuation is a big pain to advertisers.
5. gag | April 22nd, 2007 at 11:10 pm

Where can i see how these new short descriptions with the ellipsis will look like in an ad. Is there a pic or screenshot of the same, please.
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8. Saniya | January 2nd, 2009 at 4:53 am

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9. Carlos Navarro | April 2nd, 2009 at 2:39 pm

As a fiction writer I must make frequent use of quotations marks, contractions and foreign
characters, like accent marks. But with the new Yahoo puntuation meddling, much of everything I write is butchered beyond recognition with meaningless symbols and codes. Consider the following quotation from William Shakespeare:

“Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.
Nor shall death brag thou wandere’st in his shade When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st”

This how it came out after Yahoo’s punctuation police butchered it.

â€œNor lose possession of that fair thou owâ€™st. Nor shall death brag thou wandereâ€™st in his shade When in eternal lines to time thou growâ€™stâ€

My message to Yahoo: Not all your customers need to be told how to punctuate. Not all of us are illiterate. Perhaps the folks who concocted your punctuation program should go back to school and get a real education.
10. Carlos Navarro | April 11th, 2009 at 3:58 am

There is a serious glitch in Yahoo’s punctuation editing program. Or has it been infected by a major virus?

When I went to add a story to my Yahoo page the other day I was dismayed to find that my special characters and standard punctuation had been replaced wholesale by meaningless symbols.

Words of foreign origin–jalapeño, piñata, mañana, señor, naïveté, résumé, fiancée, passé–

Contractions—don’t, can’t, won’t, I’m, she’s, we’re, they’ll, you’ll–

Dialogue quotation marks–“Dorothy! Dorothy!” I said.

And quotes from classical English literature, like this one from Shakespeare –“Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st/Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade/ When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.”–

All had been changed to:

jalapeÃ±o, piÃ±ata â€”, maÃ±anaâ€“, seÃ±or, naÃ¯vetÃ©, rÃ©sumÃ©, passÃ© â€“–

donâ€™t, canâ€™t, wonâ€™t, Iâ€™m, sheâ€™s, weâ€™re, theyâ€™ll, youâ€™ll ï¿½ . .

ï¿½Dorothy! Dorothy!ï¿½ I said

â€œNor lose possession of that fair thou owâ€™st./ Nor shall death brag thou wandereâ€™st in his shade/ When in eternal lines to time thou growâ€™stâ€

I trust that Yahoo will correct the glitch, or eliminate the virus.. Otherwise, years of my work and, I assume, that of other writers posting on Yahoo will be ruined.
11. Yahoo Search Marketing Bl&hellip | June 19th, 2009 at 11:18 am

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