Just got the news... $299 USD / year. :bawling:

The annual fee doesn't apply if your site is already listed. I expect LookSmart and other PPL search engines will follow with a new annual fee.

I would suggest using HotBot or Google. Your search results will include more relevent listings... paid and free ;).

It's the start of the corporate internet ... :)

Originally posted by option
The annual fee doesn't apply if your site is already listed. I expect LookSmart and other PPL search engines will follow with a new annual fee.Looksmart right now is saying that they don't plan to do that. Of course, if you'd asked someone at Yahoo six months ago they probably would have said the same thing.

While it's not clear from the text at Yahoo's site, apparently the annual fee will only apply to listings in the "commercial directory." So if you use Express Submit to get a listing for a non-commercial site (or, as sometimes can be done, a listing in a non-commercial category for a commercial site with non-commercial content) you presumably won't have to pay annually -- at least until that policy changes.

Also, right now the annual fee applies only to the main US-based Yahoo... if you list a site in a regional version, and the Express Submit page doesn't currently state that the fee is annual. you'll be "grandfathered" just like everyone who got into the main Yahoo before this change. So if you have a site almost ready to submit, you'd better rush it -- annual fees might be on all the Yahoo sites soon.

I would suggest using HotBot or Google. Your search results will include more relevent listings... paid and free ;). Yahoo also includes both "paid and free" results, because their search (non-directory) results are supplied by Google. In many cases your result is exactly the same using Yahoo and Google.

Personally, I'd recommend looking to AllTheWeb after Google for more relevant results than at HotBot. HB draws heavily on paid listings, getting results from Inktomi and Overture. I don't really have a problem with that in principle, it's just that in the past few months my experience with FAST/AllTheWeb's relevancy has been pretty good.

I was going to submit a site to Yahoo next month but I guess not anymore. Bad timing. :stickout $299 per year is expensive, especially to get in a over-crowded directory. I might as well spend my money on extra URLs at Inktomi and give Overture a try. Would you pay $299 a year just to get included at Yahoo?

Would you pay $299 a year just to get included at Yahoo?

:eek: Hell no! What timing. The economy is not doing that great and they decided to charge that much?

Personally, i think it's too much to pay just to be listed. You have to consider that people will start moving away from yahoo and onto google/alltheweb.

Yahoo.com is a brand that will stay with the online community. However, even i stopped using it and also av.com about 2 years ago because the search results were not that good. :o

I would rather spend the $299 towards advertising than just getting listed in an already overcrowded directory. :rolleyes:

Originally posted by Pixel26
It's the start of the corporate internet ... :)

I'm assuming that smiley refers to the 'start' part of the sentence...Because the corporate internet has been around for a while now.

... Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. I'd like to hear what one of the old-school academic users of the internet would think about 2002 being the "start" of the corporate internet.

Oh well. You knew it would happen sooner or later. Now I only wonder -- will they charge you to *change* an existing listing?

Originally posted by pcsteve
Yahoo.com is a brand that will stay with the online community. However, even i stopped using it and also av.com about 2 years ago because the search results were not that good. :o
Well, in the case of AltaVista that's because they pretty much stopped updating their database.

This change at Yahoo is big, and discouraging when deciding whether to use them. But really $299 per year is much less you'd likely spend on any substantial ppc campaign at Overture, for example. It's the same annual cost as placing about eleven pages in Inktomi through their SureList program, and about six pages at AltaVista through Express Inclusion. It's less than six bucks a week, which won't even buy you an ad in the local paper (certainly not for me, since the local paper is the New York Times!)

The decision is the same as it's been since the one-time fee was instituted: does the ROI justify paying them; does the traffic or do the sales generated from the traffic offset the price? Same decision; only the math has changed.

It remains to be seen what impact this might have on Yahoo's SERPs -- will small business sites migrate out? Will some competitive categories actually become better investments, because some competition will disappear? Will users become disgruntled with a decreasing search relevancy, and stop visiting Yahoo? Which users? That's pretty much already happened for experienced, net-savvy users, but Yahoo is still the search venue of choice for those who haven't discovered the better options that sites that have never had TV spots during the Super Bowl offer.

I'll probably continue to recommend Yahoo to some clients, and probably roughly to the same kinds of clients to whom I've been recommending them for the past year or so... but now with a wait-and-see approach towards renewing the second year. As in the past, it's a decision that will have to be made individually for each site -- Yahoo's going to be a good investment for some for quite some time.

Originally posted by bigmattyh
Oh well. You knew it would happen sooner or later. Now I only wonder -- will they charge you to *change* an existing listing? Word is that the current free change form will remain. Whether it will ever actually be useful is another question; there's currently no guarantee that submissions to the free change page will be acted on... often they get no response from a Yahoo editor at all. So, from that narrow standpoint the annual fee change has a positive side: an editor will review each site every year at renewal time and a change can be requested at that time -- subject to the same editorial discretion as the initial submission, of course.

Sites submitted before the annual fee was instituted will still have only the free change form. Doesn't seem likely that there'll be a LookSmart-style paid change option.

BTW, I had the same reaction to that "start of the corporate internet" comment. That, I said to myself, must be a joke.

Two websites I've worked on get about 70% of their traffic from Yahoo. I wonder how much traffic Yahoo can generate for a web hosting website in that crowded directory. Anyone with experience willing to share that information? :)

Oh well. You knew it would happen sooner or later. Now I only wonder -- will they charge you to *change* an existing listing?

I am pretty sure they will. They're not going to let you change it directly. If they allow us to change it ourselves people will start spamming it to death and try to get top rank. So its going to go through some editor. Leaving it in the directory costs $299/year... imagine how much it would cost if they actually have to do some work. :rolleyes: Only if search engines worked a little bit like web hosting where competitors start to charge less and less. :D

Because the corporate internet has been around for a while now.

Well, it is news to a lot of people. Yahoo was the yahoo of the Internet and that is bad news to a lot of people.

I think it is good news for a lot of small sites, publishers and directories who actually setup businesses to make money by charging for services. I also think it will be easier for others to compete with yahoo and follow in thier footsteps and charge for certain services.

people will start moving away from yahoo and onto google/alltheweb.
Poeple who wanted to be there have always been there or have tried to be there. It makes no difference.

Spend your money with small niche sites and really start hating yahoo. That will be wonderful for a lot of competing sites and we don't have to care.

The annual fee doesn't apply if your site is already listed.
I don't think they have explicitly said that anywhere and may be it is just a feelgood assumption. It remains to be seen. We will know in the future. I would not be surprised to see yahoo ask everyone to renew their listings or get lost, once the dust settles. The way I look at it, they will get enough new submissions now and upadate their directory for the next few months and smoothen things out. Once it's all cool, you can expect to hear from them (if your site is already listed) and don't be surprised.

Originally posted by Gurudev


I don't think they have explicitly said that anywhere and may be it is just a feelgood assumption. It remains to be seen. We will know in the future. I would not be surprised to see yahoo ask everyone to renew their listings or get lost, once the dust settles. The way I look at it, they will get enough new submissions now and upadate their directory for the next few months and smoothen things out. Once it's all cool, you can expect to hear from them (if your site is already listed) and don't be surprised.


Yahoo! has already stated that current listings will not be assesed an annual fee. "If your web site is accepted for inclusion in the commercial Directory as part of Yahoo! Express on or after December 28, 2001, then your web site's continued inclusion in the Directory will be subject to additional review each year and you agree that your credit card will be charged the Recurring Annual Fee."

Originally posted by Gurudev
I don't think they have explicitly said that [the annual fee doesn't apply if your site is already listed] anywhere and may be it is just a feelgood assumption. Throughout the terms of the Express Submission section of their site you'll find the term "if your site was accepted for inclusion after December 28, 2001."

And, if you did submit a site before that and have a copy of the terms you agreed to, you'll find no provision to make such a change. No doubt they'd love to charge everyone annually but arent doing so for legal reasons -- they didn't write the old terms with that kind of loophole. That's different now, the new terms make it clear that the annual fee isn't necessarily always going to be $299. You'll be charged "the current annual fee."

One concern that's been raised by some in the SE marketing industry is that Yahoo has always maintained the option of dropping a site for editorial reasons, and especially if the site has changed since it's been submitted they probably could remove it and so force the site operator to make a new submission under the new terms. In practice that kind of de-listing has been very rare and most speculation has been that this is a minor concern. But really, as you say, it remains to be seen.

Originally posted by JayC
Looksmart right now is saying that they don't plan to do that.


LookSmart originally charged a $199 listing fee soon after Yahoo! began their paid commercial listings. Yahoo! then raised the listing fee to $299 and LookSmart soon followed. LookSmart will likely wait a while to see how the change goes for Yahoo!

Originally posted by option
LookSmart will likely wait a while to see how the change goes for Yahoo! Yep, I agree. I was only pointing out they're reportedly saying, that they have no such plan. As I also said, I have no doubt Yahoo's reps would have said the same up to the last minute when they sprang this new policy without so much as a press release. Inktomi, for example, gave clear notice about their recent price increase -- they didn't give the exact date, but instead something more like "on or after..."

Anyone considering making a paid submission to LookSmart should probably do it soon, in order to slip in under the current policy before LS's version of Yahoo's December 28 comes to pass.

I agree that Yahoo's pricing of $299/year is ridiculous, unless they can guarantee a minimum amount of traffics to your site for the year. Otherwise, it's better to spend that money elsewhere, such as on Overture or buying a good submission service or tool.

It's more important to get your sites listed on other potential search engines, such as Google which feeds Yahoo's search results as well. I manage one big site that gets over 2000 visitors from Google everyday, not including from google.yahoo.com :D

Google is my primary search engine now as it seems to be fair and concentrates on quality results rather than paid listings. I just hope that it would stay that way and doesn't go for the paid services. That would be a disaster.

The fee Yahoo charges is just to add your site. Most likely you'll endup at the end of the line, where noone willever see you anyway. Overture or former GoTo offers, like many these days pay-per-click advertising, which could be as expensive as a few buck per click or as cheap as a few pennies. They used to be $0.06 minimum. This is a much better way to spend you budget. Plus it's highly targetted.

Some offer pay-per-view advertising. This is also not a bad idea. If you know your market you'll always come ahead with these options.

Originally posted by gzmogrl
Overture or former GoTo offers, like many these days pay-per-click advertising, which could be as expensive as a few buck per click or as cheap as a few pennies.
[...]
Some offer pay-per-view advertising. This is also not a bad idea. If you know your market you'll always come ahead with these options. If you know your market, you could very well come out ahead paying $299/year at Yahoo. Say you have an ecommerce site where the average visitor results in $.45 of income. Yahoo is now 82 cents a day, so you come out ahead if you get two visitors a day.

Overture would break even at .45 per click... but I've seen a number of sites where Overture-provided visitors convert at a much lower rate than those from Yahoo, so it might not be that simple. You'd have to track your conversion results for users referred from each source.

Similarly for the comparison to pay-per-view advertising. If your Yahoo listing gets seen by 100 people a day, your 82 cents/day investment might not be too bad. The fact is, Yahoo still gets a lot of visitors. Common wisdom is that they tend to be more "mainstream" users than, say, Google users who tend to be more experienced and technically proficient. Which is better? Depends on your business.

And, don't forget that placement in Yahoo will help your Google PageRank. How much is that worth? I'd probably pay $299 a year for a couple of sites if I knew it would bump the PR up a point!

What does that "listing fee" apply to?

I mean for the search engine part: don't they crawl the internet and include everything they can find??

So the fee is for inclusion into a Directory, right?

Originally posted by astra4
I mean for the search engine part: don't they crawl the internet and include everything they can find??
Not exactly. Yahoo doesn't have their own spider, and their database includes only the sites accepted into the directory. But they supplement that with listings supplied by Google. So, yes, you might show up in a Yahoo search even if you're not in the directory, but directory results ("web site matches," in Yahoo's serp terminology) will, when they are found, be on the first page. The Google-supplied results (termed "web page matches") will be on the second page -- unless there are no sites returned by Yahoo itself, of course.

Originally posted by wave
I was going to submit a site to Yahoo next month but I guess not anymore. Bad timing. :stickout $299 per year is expensive, especially to get in a over-crowded directory. I might as well spend my money on extra URLs at Inktomi and give Overture a try. Would you pay $299 a year just to get included at Yahoo?

I could see paying $299/yr if the listing was ranked higher than all the "free submissions" that have became so popular here lately.

Heck, I could definitely see paying $299/yr if these search engines eliminate the "free submissions" and only listed the "pay for" links OR by chance, place all the "free submissions" in a total seperate category/section/site or what have you.

Would $299/year be worth it then?

Chad

Originally posted by gcjeepster

I could see paying $299/yr if the listing was ranked higher than all the "free submissions" that have became so popular here lately.


This is basically what I am thinking, they should wipe their directory clean and start it over with just those will to pay. I can't see paying $299 to be listed with all of the old free listings. There is no way that you can always get your search criteria to get you to the top of the list, it depends on what the users keys in. No if they guarentee that the paid listings will always come up at the top, then that might not be bad. Even with that though, you will still be in the same list with the Free registries.

Making 2 lists really is of no value, Paid vs. Free, since it really doesn't matter to the user which list the data comes from, just that it is relevent.

Would $299/year be worth it then?

The $299 fee is for paid inclusion although it is not guaranteed. What you're talking about is paid ranking. I don't think I'd pay $299 just to rank higher than non-paying sites. I'd rather be a sponsor and get listed at the top as well as among non-paying sites. :)

Only list paid listings?? I don't think that would happen... at least not anytime soon. Think of the amount of criticism they'll get if they did that today. If it happens it would be a gradual change. First of all they have to change their whole business plan and structure. Secondly they have to wait for their directories to fill up with paid listings or else the quality/quantity of links would cause searchers to go elsewhere.

Once again, anyone willing to share the quality or quantity (#, %, etc.) of traffic you get from Yahoo? :)

The $299 fee is for paid inclusion although it is not guaranteed. What you're talking about is paid ranking. I don't think I'd pay $299 just to rank higher than non-paying sites.In a way that's what you now get a Yahoo: pay to be in the directory and you'll be listed ahead of the free Google-supplied listings.

There's also some speculation that pre-annual fee sites might at some point start to be listed under the post-December 28 sites, unless they choose to begin to pay as well. Speculation is all it is, but it might make sense: the only likely reason that all sites aren't being charged annually is because the terms agreed to when they were listed wouldn't allow for it. But there was never any guarantee made about how or where sites would be listed. Yahoo can construct it results pages any way it wants to.

The corporate side of Yahoo -- as personified by the new CEO -- is making no secret of the fact that changes are coming. The general idea is increased "monetization" and decreasing emphasis on areas of the business that don't generate income.

So the annual fee is one such change. The inclusion of Overture listings (they show up as "sponsored sites"), that started in November was one. And that agreement ends in April; by that time Yahoo is expected to have its own PPC program ready to go to replace it.