Yahoo! introduces annual fee

Commercial sites paying Yahoo! to get listed in the popular Web directory must now pay an annual fee of US$ 299 to keep their listing.

(Dec 30 2001) We are not against search sites earning an income, and we are perfectly willing to tolerate paid search result listings, as long as they are clearly marked as such. So although we do find the idea of Yahoo! including paid results from Overture a bit annoying, we can live with them.

We are also willing to tolerate that directories ask commercial companies for a reasonable fee in order to get their sites listed, as long as the directory lists high quality non-profit sites for free.

Both Yahoo! and LookSmart (through Zeal) do that, thus ensuring that the directories remain more than glorified business directories. (In the Open Directory -- and therefore also the Pandia Plus directory -- all listings are free.)

However, Yahoo's latest attempt to raise money seriously undermines the directory's credibility as a broad based Web guide.

Yahoo! has actually decided to demand an annual fee of US$299 for all paid listings included later than December 27 this year. This fee comes in addition to the initial fee of US$ 299 which commercial sites have to pay in order to get their sites considered for inclusion.

Why is this a problem? To large corporations 300 bucks are peanuts, and non-commercial sites get listed for free, right? So Yahoo! will remain a good source for general information, not only for shopping and business to business transactions, right?

In theory, the answer should be yes. In practice? Ahhh, we doubt it!

You see, a huge number of useful sites belong to a gray area between non-commercial and purely commercial sites. These are sites like Pandia -- resources that provide useful information on particular topics and who try to pay their expenses by adding banner ads, taking part in affiliate programs, and by providing advice for those who ask for it.

Yahoo! normally considers these sites commercial. Pandia tried for a year to get listed in Yahoo! as a non-profit site. We got no response. Two days after having paid the required fee, we were listed. Yahoo! knows a potential paying customer when it sees one.

Unfortunately, sites like Pandia are hardly lucrative, and if they are not run as hobby projects, they are certainly owned by small companies that will find another annual fee of 300 dollars unacceptable.

If your listing is buried below pay-per-click results from Overture and companies with names that begins with the number 1 (they choose such names i order to get listed at the top of the alphabetical ranking) it is actually not worth it. It is much better to optimize your site for Google, which brings in most of the traffic anyway.

Hence in the long run this new tactic will mean that the Yahoo! directory will lack a lot of high quality sites not willing to pay. The first year Yahoo! users won't notice. After all, the old sites do not have to pay for their "subscription", and sites like Pandia will remain in the database.

Ultimately, however, the quality of results will suffer. Yes, Yahoo! does include results from Google as well, but if Google is what makes Yahoo! searching tick, searchers will go directly to the Google search engine instead, bypassing Yahoo! altogether.

This does not bode well for the future of Yahoo!

Still, there are arguments for introducing an annual fee. By excluding sites that do not pay the fee, Yahoo! would be able to get rid of old sites and dead links that do not contribute to the quality of the site. However, you do not need a 300 dollars fee to achieve that. 30 dollars would be more like it. Moreover, one should think that the removal of dead links was an obvious part of search directory maintenance in any case.

This is what Yahoo! says about the matter:

"The current fee for Yahoo! Express for initial consideration in the Directory is a NON-REFUNDABLE fee of US $299.00 applicable for each web site submitted that does not include adult content and/or services. If you are submitting a site offering adult content and/or services, the applicable fee for initial consideration in the Directory is a NON-REFUNDABLE FEE of US $600.00. (...) You acknowledge that the payment of this fee is for consideration of your site AND DOES NOT IN ANY WAY GUARANTEE THAT YOUR SITE WILL BE INCLUDED IN THE DIRECTORY. (...)"

Webmaster World discussion on the new Yahoo! policy.
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