Forum Moderators: open
Many colleges and businesses have the homepage set to Yahoo. There may be professionals at this forum who have been doing this after having been contracted to work for institutions. Or they may have provided a link to Yahoo from a client's website.
I would urge them to consider whether they wish to continue doing this. Yahoo used to be worth setting as a home page for clients. It provided quality search results. Now it is flooded with adverts, plagued by casino pop-unders, and, with the $300 recurring fee on top of the PPC listings, will become increasingly dominated by commercial Web sites.
Do you want to provide free traffic to such a portal?
I do have a link to them in my site and it will stay there. Trying to make a point to Yahoo by not linking to their site is like tossing a pebble into the ocean off the coast of California and then expecting that some guy in Australia will feel the wave. Yahoo doesn't get their traffic from links - they get it from people typing it in directly or from searching at AOL for Yahoo (you know what I mean :)).
Yahoo is a complete waste of web space - I wouldn't ever consider actually using it to search for info. Those pop-unders are an absolute disgrace - promoting those pathetic little peeping cameras. Cheap, nasty and in the same league as looksmart.
I'll tell you, it breaks my heart in 2 when I have to pay for their services - it totally kills me inside.
I'll meet Yahoo in any pub car park he chooses - I'll be the guy with his jacket off ;)
Careful, they may take your shirt next ... :)
Why would it break your heart in two if you are getting a positive return on your investment? How is it you Have pay for their services?
I run a business, and I price my services based on the value those services will produce for the client. Why on earth would anyone feel like Yahoo is evil for doing the same thing?
What else will produce even close to the amount of traffic a Yahoo listing can produce for $300.00 per year?
2. at the same time, number of Yahoo users has hugely diminished (thus value for money has greatly decreased).
3. quality and integrity of the directory has diminished to the point where the use of sneaky pop-under adverts for voyeur peeping kits interupts your searching.
4. duplicitous editorial policy - the only consistency I have observed, is the dismay of Yahoo's clients in seeing their title and description after having been bastardised.
5. ROI is NEVER guaranteed. If your website business operates in a highly competitive area, you might not receive the level of traffic required to achieve an ROI. Plenty of sites get totally buried.
My situation is slightly different from yours (WG), as I don't work for clients in the way of providing web services, I run my own web businesses which supply products and services direct to the end user. When I shell out money from my 'own' pocket, on an investment that may or may not get me an ROI, that's when it hurts.
By paying the fees, I am helping to perpetuate an advertising medium which is slowly but surely pricing out the 'small' businesses.
I only hope that Yahoo will soon find that their pricing structure has caused their own profitability to drop, due to the diminishing returns from their price hikes.
This has to happen eventually as Yahoo's popularity falls even further, and other, more convincing, advertising opportunities present themselves.
