Yahoo Paid Inclusion - on the way?

[markm]

Get ready for Yahoo Paid Inclusion + PPC

Well, I am not sure how far off this is, but I just came back from a focus group sponsored by Yahoo. They were looking for feedback for a potential new Paid Inclusion program and I believe they brought in 6 separate focus groups. Whether this is something they are working on or is just in the early marketing stages, I don't know.

What is interesting was they were really just looking for feedback on how to position it, not on features.

Apparently, it would work something like this:

1. There will be a setup fee and a modest PPC component (fixed I believe)
2. Each submission will be reviewed by 'a team' of reviewers to insure relevancy.
3. Personal help will be given to anyone trying to set up an account, if needed.
4. Extensive tools will be given to track ROI.

We were asked to review different types of message campaigns, the different themes were:

1. Ease of use - easy to set up and get online
2 the most relevant traffic - (due to the human review of submissions)
3. Tracking tools and ROI measurement
4. Personal support (kind of partnering with Yahoo type of message).

There were actually 5 different sets of messaging, I only remember 4 right now.

There were not clear on how these results appear on the search pages, whether these would show up above the spidered pages.

The focus group was done by an independent party, but I believe Yahoo dudes were which us from cameras and came back with some questions from the Yahoo observers.

Anyone have any questions, fire away. Not much information was given beyond basic descriptions of the product.

My assumption is that these paid submissions would show up above spidered results from Google or Inktomi results (if and when that happens.)

Mark

[2_much]

Any ideas what types of results they would use? Any specifics about directory listings vs search engine listings?

[markm]

One of the questions that filtered back from the Yahoo observers was to ask us if would be good to automatically give a Yahoo directory listing to anyone who bought into the paid inclusion. Of course I said that would be a good idea.

But I do think they are not talking about this service for the search engine listings. I can only think that there would be some preferential treatment over reviewed sites compared to spidered sites. Maybe this is Yahoo's answer to Google. They will get you better relevance by bringing people into the equation (true or not..that's the message).

Mark