Yahoo has annouced that by the end of this year all forms of Paid Inclusion into the Yahoo Search Index will be shut down!
This is probably the best news I have heard from Yahoo for a long time for Domainers.
Background… Trellian was a long standing Yahoo partner, reselling Paid Inclusion services via our Priority Submit service since 2001, since the good old Inktomi and AltaVista paid inclusion days. Unfortunately Inktomi was acquired by Overture and shortly later Overture and AltaVista was acquired by Yahoo.
As soon as Yahoo started changing the program structure, within a single month the service nose dived in terms of sales and revenues to next to nothing. A huge drop was seen by all the partners. Some of the resellers pulled out all together as a result! It was a rather painfull time for all from what I recall.
Basically Yahoo believed that having a a combination of a flat fee and a CPC component paid inclusion program was far more attractive than just a flat fee program. On paper yes it sure must have looked a far better formula. What Yahoo did not anticipate was that the vast majority of the clients using the original flat fee only program were small businesses, where a single yearly flat fee was very easy to understand and detemine of worth while..
The CPC componant changed the dynamics and changed the customer base…
Anyway back to why this is good news for domainers… Supporting an alternative means of having sites included in the Yahoo search index, via a system that, if you knew what you were doing, gave preferantial rankings to paid inclusion sites meant that such clients did not have to participate in the Yahoo Search Markting CPC program.
The fewer the advertisers, the lower the competition on keywords, the smaller keyword coverage, the lower the PPC bid rates. All of this means that Yahoo was not able to monetize as much of the domain traffic or pay as much per click to their partners, the parking companies.
In order for Yahoo to be more competitive agains the power of Google, it needs to to get more PPC advertisers and having a program that gives potential advertiers an alternative option was not helping. So overall this is good news for Domainers and lets hope that they have some smart ways to convert the Yahoo Search Submit Basic clients over to their PPC channel instead!
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