I will always remember the day when I was at a conference in New York…I believe it was in 2003…and the Yahoo! speaker announced that they would be charging people to get into their directory and then, on top of that initial, yearly, $299 charge, they would also charge a per-click fee every time someone clicked a listing. Imagine that.
Luckily, people booed and that model never went forward.
So now when Yahoo! needs a some more cash, they don’t bother with silly announcements that could get booed. They just get right down to charging their customers. The fine print is in place, it’s all legal, so it must be all good. Oh, how I miss the corporate life and the wonderful decisions that come from a spreadsheet.
There is a reason I don’t advertise with Yahoo!. And I’m really glad I don’t. Because if I were a Yahoo! advertiser, it is likely that they would have already “optimized” my account, like they just did for so many unwitting other accounts, by adding keywords and distribution that results in more exposure, more clicks and higher costs with a complete disregard to relevance and transparency.
The fact that things are technically “legal” doesn’t make them right. There’s no wonder that Yahoo! continues to come up short in their quest to be the leader in online search. They just don’t seem to understand that customers are actually people.
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