Yahoo Is Looking For A Few Geniuses, And A Lot Of Idiots

The new Paid Inclusion Program from Yahoo, if you haven't heard, allows a web site to guarentee inclusion (but not position) for a fee of $10-$49 per page plus $0.15 or $0.30 per click-through. Not only do they guarentee that your pages will be in Yahoo (and all Yahoo Network properties) but you're pages will be re-indexed every 48 hours, and you'll get all kinds of tracking info and tender loving customer care. All of that sounds very nice, except of course for the $0.15 or $0.30 cost per click. Yahoo is asking site owners to sign an open-ended contract, promising to pay these fairly steep fees on every lead generated through any Yahoo property (Yahoo, Alta Vista, AllTheWeb, etc.) without any cap or ability to predict the total cost. They've invented the world's first search marketing program where participants will undoubtedly hope that it really doesn't go too well. Of course, there is a way out. Just stop making the necessary deposits into your account and the good folks at Yahoo will gladly drop your listings and you can be in the money-saving position of not being listed at all. In any Yahoo property. Talk about choosing the lesser of two evils. To make the choice even tougher, in the same breath that they announced this new program, Yahoo told the world that their goal is to have the largest possible free crawl of the web, and that participating in the paid inclusion program will have no effect what-so-ever on page position. In other words, your pages will probably be in Yahoo for free anyway, and paying doesn't help get your listings on to the first, second, third or even fifteenth page if they aren't relevant. Listening to the guys from Yahoo try and finesse the paradox of these two statements was entertaining. They bragged about the quality of their free crawl and boasted of their deep committment to find every page they possibly could find for free, but somehow they were able to leave just a little bit of doubt that they might not find your pages. The SiteMatch program was just a simple little alternative they came up with for people who 'wanted to be sure'. They also tried, with straight faces, to say that the real reason for SiteMatch was the '48 hour refresh, statistics and customer service.' That's worth $0.30 per click on every visitor day in and day out? I think SiteMatch will be popular with geniuses and idiots. The geniuses are the ones who can calculate their ROI to be clearly greater, after fully diluting all the traffic through their own conversion rates, than the $0.15 or $0.30 that Yahoo is asking, and who have large or frequently updated site. If you're making money every click buying clicks is a very smart move. This will be a relatively rare company, but clearly there will be thousands of them. The idiots will sign up out of fear, confusion, ignorance, or some goal other than profit. Let's look at each of them. * Fear. Many companies, especially in the growing 'search mania', will be terrified of being left out of Yahoo. They'll pay up. * Confusion. These programs are confusing. I'd say intentionally so. At SES, in rooms with over 500 full time search professionals, there were dozens of questions and nobody could agree on where the lines were or the truth was, and this was after hearing two senior Yahoo officials explain the program with PowerPoint and all. A week later it's no clearer. * Ignorance. A lot of people will find out that Yahoo has a program where you pay to get your web pages listed, and think that participating is how you get your pages into Yahoo. (Isn't it strange that it isn't?) Worse, search submit firms and agencies will either lie or confuse many others to think this is true. * Other Goals. Competive pressures, a boss who really doesn't get it, a lack of analytics, a budget that needs to get spent, and a hundred other reasons will cause companies to sign up and pay this money to Yahoo. For the reasons stated above I think lots of people will sign up, and Yahoo will make lots of money. I also think they deserve to be paid for their services. But I don't think that inducing confusion, contradition, and fear is a good business practice. As a result, I think the program will be dramatically changed by its first anniversary. At least I hope so. Note: I realize that the above does not cover all of the details and subtlety of SiteMatch. Others are covering these elsewhere, although the fact that it takes pages to fully discuss it sort of proves my point. I'll get back into more of these details, including the more positive aspects of the program, in the near future. Update: There's now a follow up entry - SiteMatch Revisited Posted by Craig Danuloff at March 12, 2004 1:54 AM