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Try a 70% discount for all the agony you've caused me and bring the directory back the way it was. Something is definately brewing behind closed doors for them to care enough to create a survey regarding the matter of submissions and the likelyhood of renewal rates. Wonder what it could be. Duhh.
in my view, for commerical listings, google is the biggest spam engine on the planet. i think yahoo added google for info type sites and has other plans for commerical searchers. mabe FAST?
I totally agree that google is a spam engine for commercial sites and I used to use yahoo to search for commercial content (not any more though). However you know who they added for commercial searches don't you? It was overture.
When people are searching on yahoo for commercial content (we all know that yahoo users converted well) they will find that most of the google results are spammed out, tough to sift through, so what do they do? Click on the overture listings making Yahoo a pile of money.
It bugs me that I don't have a spot to search for commercial content anymore, and that I took a beating by the switch and users are worse off by having another person serving up google results but if they don't lose searchers to google it was a wise business move. Not only that but I'll admit it, it isn't viable to have employees maintain that directory forever. The way Dmoz does it is the only viable solution.
Final Conclusion
Yahoo: more money
Users: worse off, less selection, typical yahoo users would have found the old results easier to navigate (probably half only look at the overture listings now)
Webmasters: less money, have to pay overture for listings, got screwed by having no advanced notice of the change during busiest time of the year
Based on jacon4s post, Yahoo got roughly $0.25M a day in Overture revenue for the first 9 months of 2002. I think my estimate of $0.5M revenue per day because of increased Overture exposure looks quite sound.
I have already seen a significant drop in Yahoo sponsor listings [sponsorlistings.yahoo.com] in categories that I monitor. If Business Express revenue suffers in the same way (lower new and repeat customers), this will cancel out any increased revenue from Overture in the long term.
Just my opinion though ;)
I think my estimate of $0.5M revenue per day because of increased Overture exposure looks quite sound.
Apart from the fact that Yahoo is getting more like 2/3 of the PPC value of their clicks as opposed to your guesstimated 1/2.
Details on Overture revenue sharing is being discussed here [webmasterworld.com].
Overture expects to share with its partners, on average, about 61 percent of paid-search profits from the fourth quarter this year.
And you can bet that Yahoo is on the higher end of the sliding scale that average is based upon being that they have the leverage of being Overture's single largest source of traffic.
Ultimately this is a debate that is not likely to find resolution as it is largely based on speculation.
While things are looking mighty rosey for them at the moment, whether Yahoo made a good or bad move with this is something that only time will tell for certain.
Regardless of which side of the fence your view is from, it'll be interesting watching things develop over the next few months...
... and perhaps a fun thread to revisit with 20/20 hindsight :)
Yes, we webmasters who got screwed in the deal are a relatively small bunch... but take into consideration that I'm a professional web developer, and then throw in the fact that I wouldn't even consider pushing Yahoo! on any of my clients at the moment. A 25% savings for a 75% decline in business is hardly worth it. I won't continue to send my clients down this path. So when they lost me, they lost a lot of "reviews" and renewals for the upcoming year.
The odds are such that it really doesn't matter. I can get into Google for free, and when Yahoo pulls out another wild card, we'll all be covered since Google reportedly gets about 50% of the total SE traffic anyway (which means Yahoo doesn't since there are a few other SE's out there too).
How's that for simple math?
~Pink
Are they still going to charge for renewals this year or not?
Does anyone know?
~Pink
Up to now, about 30 % of accounts where terminated.
It's not a case of "should I" or "shouldn't I". The point is that there is no place to do it within my Yahoo account. What I was asking above was this: Are THEY going to charge for renewals this year, and, if so, what day does this begin?
~Pink
Actually they are hotmail accounts which I still use for this very purpose. They haven't sent anything, and I couldn't find anything in either of my accounts (I have two accounts).
There is absolutely no documentation that I am going to be charged, and this concerns me. I can see my payment history, which is cool, but nothing is showing up in the "upcoming" area. Many of my sites are adult in nature, so this means $600 a pop - with no notification, and no way to cancel. Are they issuing a discount? I haven't received any type of notice what so ever, in my account or via email.
Yikes! When did their policy change over to annual "reviews"? Does anyone know?
Thanks,
~Pink
