Yahoo Front Page Marketplace

Get shown on the Yahoo.com page but no discussion here?

[ThomasAJ]

I haven't 'studied' Yahoo for a year now, but I came across a new (I think) service they are offering called 'Front Page Marketplace'. Your ad gets shown on the absolute top level page for only 70 cents a click.

The info is here:
[smallbusiness.yahoo.com ]

When I tried to sign up, it mentioned it was in BETA.

Now I am very puzzled.

I could not find any discussion of this service on WebmasterWorld.

So does it suck, no one knows about it, no one cares, too expensive, old hat, I'm blind!?

[ThomasAJ]

Probably the thing against it is that one would get a lot of unqualified traffic unlike thru search engines. Maybe best for known brands.

Anyway, is there anyone out there in cyberspace?

Also I noticed that the Yahoo forum is relatively quiet. Maybe it reflects Yahoo's non-importance?

[Chicago]

Interesting.

This is non-targeted traffic at its finest.

This is indicative of several things in my opinion. And certainly Yahoo's "non-importance" is not one of them. They are arguable more important than ever.

1. Depressed ad sales on non-targeted pages / searches.
2. Excess inventory.
3. CPCs domination of tradition branding CPMs. And the ad buying customer base moving in a horizontal manner in accordance with a greater customer acceptance level of Internet marketing amongst businesses
4. ROS campaigns (run of site) on portals becoming obsolete.
5. A strategy to interchange large corporate branding campaigns (which are becoming smarter using services like broad match - and not buying portal home page inventory) to thousands of small advertisers with 3$ maximum spends per day.

Regardless it is bad inventory and a scheme that anyone with experience can see through ~ its too bad that most people buying cpc inventory these days and into the future will not be able to differentiate between the two. ~ well, i guess it gives *us* reason for being.

[ThomasAJ]

Thanks for your thoughts Chicago.

I am not an experienced advertiser though I have used Adwords since the beginning in a small way.

I sell my own software for a very specific type of client so I guess non-targeted ad styles like this would be useless for me.

Maybe I should spend a couple of hundred bucks to confirm. After all one of the basic tenets of advertising is to test test test.

[2_much]

There's been a lot happening in other areas of the search world which is why I think Yahoo has been quiet.

Untargetted traffic could help large corporations that are trying to brand their projects, but not if you have a very targeted product. If you have a few extra hundred dollars you might want to explore different keywords in Adwords or buy a couple of links :-)

[skibum]

If they don't sell rich media homepage ads anymore, this may be an attempt to retain some of the cash they used to generate from those.

One client put one on the hompage for 8 hours I think it was, and it cost somewhere between $150,000 and $250,000.

[RobbieD]

One client put one on the hompage for 8 hours I think it was, and it cost somewhere between $150,000 and $250,000.

WOW!