Forum Moderators: open
(edited by: agerhart at 2:52 pm (gmt) on Sep. 5, 2001
You are absolutely right, and I suppose I am talking about one or two specific markets.......but I believe the general idea of ROI still applies to each market.
Yahoo! lets you in......gives you a good placement and listing......you're site is now there - for good.
I think that no matter what market you are in, as long as you are selling a service or product, you are going to see a ROI at some point.
You are a poodle for Yahoo. You could run the same line if they set the price to $3,000 or $30,000. EVENTUALLY it may pay to be in there.
I am afraid there is no excuse for a sudden 50% price hike in any industry. Simple courtesy for customers would stop most organizations from behaving like that.
There is NO excuse for that sort of approach. There may well be business benefits for Yahoo in such a big short term cash grab, but it doesn't excuse the unethical approach to customer relations, even if you think they are wonderful.
I really don't think that was called for. I am not interested in getting into a petty argument with you.
I was merely trying to point out that although the price increase stinks......Yahoo! is still worth shelling out the bucks.
I am in no way a "poodle" for Yahoo. Maybe someone who enjoys all of the referrals from them, but nothing more.
[qs.cnnfn.cnn.com...]
The value of a Yahoo listing varies totally by market... and the value for money factor just got a whole lot lower.
If any compare cyber media placement to classic media placement will find 299$ is a pimple on a roache's butt.
If the question is living without Y! traffic plus the benefit this listing gets on other engines for beeing cheap, the answer is no.
LOL! hehe
Napoleon,
Unless you are selling $.02 widgets, and at the rate of 1 a day, you will probably see your money back soon, and then some!........if you have a good listing.
Why do you have such a grudge towards Yahoo!.....you have me curious.
Now get real. They have just stung you with a 50% hike.
(edited by: Napoleon at 6:02 pm (gmt) on Sep. 5, 2001
Is arrogant behavior from the Yahoo directory a suprise? No.
Is $299 going to be a worthwhile investment for a Yahoo directory listing? Depends on your target market... do your research before submitting.
Is $299 an unreasonably high fee for the amount of exposure a good Yahoo listing can provide? No. US businesses can call their local phone book publisher and inquire about the rates for Yellow Page display ads for comparison... Yahoo's new rates will suddenly seem humblingly cheap. Call any national circulation magazine reaching your target audience and ask for rates on 1/6 page display ads. The *cheap* magazines will charge around $300 per issue. At least Yahoo's fee is a ONE TIME expense.
Find a print publication that reaches a worldwide audience in your target market and see if they even have international ad rates. If so, I guarantee the new Yahoo fee will suddenly seem like pocket change in the couch cushions of an international advertising campaign.
No, it wasn't nice or polite of Yahoo to raise their rates so drastically with no warning. However, internet businesses have gotten UTTERLY SPOILED into thinking quality promotion should be cheap or free. Quality promotion hasn't been cheap or free in the "brick & mortar" world for a long time.
If you don't like Yahoo's new rates, write them a letter of protest, vote with your dollars, work on improving your Google rankings... etc., etc. There are things you can do to express your frustration, but getting excessively negative and aggravated with your fellow WebmasterWorld members certainly won't help at all...
It already does in most cases............
1) does your site generate revenue? If it does then Yahoo is a must. And don't tell me that $299 is too much at that point because if your site isn't going to make that back for you, your revenue model needs some serious attention
2) is your site a personal for fun site (non revenue)? If so then put in on your calendar that every Monday morning you submit via the free submit until you get in. Yahoo is not going to be your biggest traffic producer anyway. Yahoo is quickly becoming the 'shopping directory'.
sure - I'm as annoyed as the next guy that Yahoo bumped the price - I'm in Canada and for me it's essentially $450 now and I'm sure it's worse for other as well but I'm still going to do it.
What really gets me is the guy who says 'I will not pay Yahoo $299 but I will spent $3000 on business cards, brochures and direct mailers and then $2000 for a one time back page magazine ad'.
Even at $299 it's some of the best promotional money you can spend.
I do feel that the point is that Yahoo did not inform anyone, in advance, that they were increasing their prices. This makes us look unprofessional to clients and creates all of this bad feeling toward them from us.
My main gripe is with their 'terms of inclusion' which seems of late to be an excuse for rejecting a site and then expecting the site owner to stump up another fee for another try. I now shudder every time a client comes to me with a Java/Fireworks navigation system and will not (IMHO understandably) change the structure of their site, company branding, remove DHTML elements, take out Flash etc. just to appear in Yahoo. Without this, I would still recommend Yahoo even with the increased price.
I have also read, but luckily not experienced, instances of sites being removed retrospectively for 'reasons unknown'.
So I do not know if inclusion in Yahoo is permanent, or there is a chance of being removed at the whim of an editor, but it is really time that Yahoo, GoTo, AV et al learned some 'customer service' from somewhere, even if it is 'traditional' media.
Witness the response of Fast when they took the trouble to respond to a 'spam report', come to this Forum to answer questions and put the record straight and the plaudits they received from us for doing so.
We would be happier, they would get more business (remember this hike applies to the consultant and client alike), and untimately they will make more money .
This really isn't too much too ask or expecting Yahoo to take a crash course in 'rocket science'.
What - they can't make a script to check for this with all the money they are pulling in?
Yahoo is probably the last place I go when researching for information. I have always found them to be a poor source of information and think a $100 price increase will make this even worse.
I have considered paying the $200 on several occasions, but I just couldn't bring myself to hand them the money.
Nor could I ever find it in my heart to pay AltaVista based on what they have done in the past.
I guess I am just stubborn. Yahoo is going to end up a directory of sites that have enough money to pay them and people that don't know any better going there.
$300 is just a ridiculous price to pay in my book for inclusion iin a directory that if people knew how it worked - would never go there.
Just my 2 cents. The deserve to go out of business along with AV and Inktomi.
morgue1.corp.yahoo.com - seems to be a 404 checker. Maybe they just haven't automated the actual removal process. ???who knows???
I figured this would never work with Yahoo, but I found some and all of those had either already been regsitered a day or two earlier - all were made into porn redirects - or they were existing sites that had a 404 subpage.
It doesn't take long to find one, and it's not a lot percentage wise, but I know that - for example - the Google Directory doesn't have this problem - as they blank out the 404s at the bottom. This still means there are tens of thousands of 404 pages. Maybe they give them a certain amount of time before removing them...
Good point.. For a listing in a shopping/service directory in the US market it is cheap. For listings for information sites it is horeendously expensive.
Yahoo does run the risk of being the directory equivalent of GoTo. Already very few savvy peope use it to find information - there are much better alternatives.
I think the free market always wins, and Yahoo will thrive or fail based on how useful its index is. Does it compete with GoTo for shoppers or Google/Teoma/Wisenut etc for information searchers. It is fairly clear what market it wants to compete in... the cash rich one, and it makes immediate sense if you want to raise cash quick. But what future does that market really have? I suggest that the people really wanting to go to a search engine to search for ads is reducing fast. Most want objective information, and the cash rich advertisers who are slowly dominating Yahoo generally do not provide that.
I deal with clients who don't blink twice at the submission fee. But if I take off my SEO hat and put on my searcher hat, it's hideous! Where does one go these days for relevance? If I am looking for information about how to lay my own floor [search.yahoo.com], I am not looking for a commercial product, but information.
>Vote with your wallets, don't give them a dime.
Nice idea, but do you think it'll work? The vast majority of SEOs won't support a boycott. How could they, and still be ethical? Besides, Yahoo couldn't care less about this industry. They've demonstrated that repeatedly over the years. What they're concerned about is searchers. Now, if they stopped using Yahoo, Yahoo would pay attention.
If the directories/SEs would simply find a creative way to fund themselves, none of us would be putting up with this mess!
They might be inching there way there, but have a LONG way to go till they get there. YAHOO! is straight up about advertising and so is GoTo.
LookSmart on the other hand has sold it's soul to the search engine devil. Using LookSmart or any of its partner directories, one is ALWAYS getting "Featured sites" as GoTo listings appear around the web. Large companies can submit virtually anything to L$ and get it in. Unfortunately, the first listing in L$ with the a company name as the title is likely to get buried. The gold (if there is any left int he budget) lies in the additional listings, which may have the title of the page instead of the company or site.
There are plenty of good keywords and phrases for which YAHOO! still turns up relatively few results. A little research on GoTo combined with a site that reflects the description submitted virtually guarantees good placement and traffic from YAHOO!
A YAHOO! listing beats banner ads hands down (figure on average a click thorugh rate of .05% and then a conversion of between 1% and 5% from the click-throughs. Many clients get more monthly traffic from their now $299.00 listing in YAHOO! than they do spending 2-500/month on GoTo. When submitting to YAHOO!, begin with the end (placement) in mind, don't follow your competitors and use the same keywords if there are already more than 100 sites (or even 40 sites) coming up for the keyword combinations your competitors are using.
.02
I would have no problem with a review fee and a placement fee. Something like $50 for a review, $300 more if accepted, that would at least establish a connection between the fee(s) and the service received. The all or nothing fee model is not customer friendly at all, and I suspect is at the root of some of the resentment expressed, there is no way to know if the site submitted will be accepted even if you do everything "right".
Actually, a lot of my clients come to me after they've been rejected by Yahoo, so I handle this stuff fairly often.
When a site is rejected, one has 30 days to change it and appeal. An appeal is not difficult to win once one familiarizes oneself with Yahoo's guidelines.
While I complain a lot about the very existence of submission fees, the truth is that they do buy a certain amount of customer service. Take advantage of it!
"Merrill Lynch on Tuesday estimated that Yahoo's share of the total online advertising market was 9 percent in the second quarter, down from 15 percent in the same period last year. AOL Time Warner's (AOL) America Online, meanwhile, saw its share rise to 44 percent from 33 percent last year. Even Microsoft's (MSFT) MSN gained traction, taking 10 percent of the market, up from the 7 percent it held in last year's Q2."
It looks as though it's a case of "When the chips are down the price goes up!" Unfortunately, as is so often the case in our corner of the economy, the belly often follows.
Upsidetoday's [upside.com] Ryan Tate, painting the downside for Yahoo! writes, "... indicators continue to show that the portal is sliding relative to its competitors while a new management team led by Hollywood vet Terry Semel searches for a replacement for Anil Singh, the chief sales and marketing officer who left in May."
With MSN having passed Yahoo!'s worldwide ad revenue in the second quarter, things are going from bad to worse at a company which, until seduced by Google’s easy manner and clean interface, held the high ground in terms of traffic referrals and ad revenues. In the light of this report, it's perhaps not surprising that a $100 hike should have been imposed so arbitrarily and without thought for those having to pay it.
Quoting a range of analysts, the article [upside.com] is penetrating and blunt.
"I was a little bit surprised when it happened, quite frankly," said CIBC World Markets analyst John Corcoran, who follows Yahoo.It's all the more difficult for Yahoo to fight back after four months without a sales honcho.
"Given the challenges the company has had in growing their revenue, having a leader for that particular division would be a major priority," said Derek Brown of WR Hambrecht.
Brown added that the company's strategy has been a little unclear since Semel took the helm in May. "There's clearly a lack of information and understanding," he said. "All things being equal, the only signs that we have are external, and tend not to be very positive right now."
Economists and financial analysts are a bit like venture capitalists. They have no morals and behave like a pack of wild dogs when they smell blood. Theirs is a vicious sport and they appear to love it. They're taunting Yahoo! as it totters around in a dazed circle, fending them off with the occasional limp feint such as that which saw its submission prices leap to equal Looksmart's.
The writing is on the wall, the deal is done, and the fat lady is about to sing. The money men will have their day. Corcoran notes that Yahoo! "...has traditionally not done much work with ad agencies and media buyers but is making a big push to do so."
This, however, will not be enough. As Tate writes:
"...the company needs an ad sector turnaround before its own prospects brighten. Analysts don't hold out much hope that premium services, which users and businesses must pay for, will have much impact on Yahoo's top or bottom line any time soon.As U.S. Bancorp's Safa Rashtchy put it in a research note Tuesday, "We continue to believe a near-term comeback for Yahoo will require an advertising rebound, and that premium services collectively represent a longer-term potential."
This is ugly stuff. Rashtchy’s words are as flat and cold as those of a judge addressing the condemned. We all know that there is no ‘longer term’ in this business.
Yes, this is the beginning of the end for Yahoo! It really saddens me to see a once proud company reduced to a dazed and jibbering wreck by its own ineptitude. Worse, we who have supported it will have to watch as it’s brought to the ground by a frenzied pack of fiscal jackals with slavering jaws and blood-crazed eyes.
Yahoo! is as carrion to the vulture’s claw and only one thing consoles me - it will not be carrion for long. These economists are insatiable.
Ah, well, as some might say, “What goes around comes around.”
A site redesign is in order for Y!...I have some free time.
