According to Parked.com, the Yahoo directive has been forwarded to other Yahoo feed partners. DomainNameWire indicated that the enforcement policy would apply to Marchex and the other big players.
Though I understand the reasons for arbitrage it is a practice I dislike. To me, moving people who chose to employ direct navigation from one feed to another feed is a step backwords in the user-friendliness of direct navigation. Worse, in many cases the intermediate click-step typically involves clicking on a link that suggests the click will lead to an informative website. Not so. Just another feed.
Of course, those making coin on the price differentials have much to be happy about and much to lament if this goes away.
Is easy money not getting any easier - short of fraud?
[edited by: Webwork at 3:12 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2008]
I could infer that Parked.com's email, which clearly stated that Yahoo was taking wider action, was an attempt to put Parked.com in a better light: "Hey, it's not just us . . "
Is any other parking company reporting a similar notice?
Has anyone seen an official statement by Yahoo?
the user-friendliness of direct navigation
An oxymoron...
I could infer that Parked.com's email, which clearly stated that Yahoo was taking wider action, was an attempt to put Parked.com in a better light: "Hey, it's not just us . . "
I don't know about the other Yahoo feed based parking companies, but arbitrage was pretty widespread at Parked (if you do a search for a few juicy keyphrases before noon 2/14 and note the ad URL's you'll see what I mean). Perhaps they just got their hands slapped personally.
Overall, I think its a good thing for the users, probably for competing advertisers too.
It's really hitting the fan at some of the domain forums though - gee, some people may actually have to put some effort in to get a return on their investment. Oh the horror ...
[edited by: MamaDawg at 6:03 pm (utc) on Feb. 13, 2008]
DomainNameWire is reporting that, effective this Friday, Yahoo will no longer allow domain click arbitrage - buying traffic via Adwords or Adsense to pass that traffic to Yahoo's domain feed.This could be very problematic for some of the big players and could indicate an organised, fear driven backlash against this kind of activity. The RICO implications will have a lot of the monetisers worried. This and other moves look very like the wagons being circled.According to Parked.com, the Yahoo directive has been forwarded to other Yahoo feed partners. DomainNameWire indicated that the enforcement policy would apply to Marchex and the other big players.
To me, moving people who chose to employ direct navigation from one feed to another feed is a step backwords in the user-friendliness of direct navigation. Worse, in many cases the intermediate click-step typically involves clicking on a link that suggests the click will lead to an informative website. Not so. Just another feed.The next step will be blanket dns/frame src redirect penalties applied across search engines. (This may have been the motivation for some of the smarter large scale domainers to start to develop their parked domains with content.)
The strange thing was that some people in the domaining business didn't even realise that such a crackdown was going to happen. Though they might just have been hoping that it wouldn't happen to them.
Regards...jmcc
