Kind of a sad day here at West Virginia’s search engine marketing headquarters. I received this email last night from Yahoo!:
Dear Ambassador,
As a result of Yahoo!’s upcoming transition to Microsoft Advertising adCenter’s search platform, we will be discontinuing the Yahoo! Ambassador Program effective September 30, 2010.
Based on our current plans, after September 30, 2010, we will no longer accept new advertisers for Yahoo! Sponsored Search.
Yahoo! ended the program back in 2008 for all intents and purposes by not accepting new Ambassadors, so I guess this shouldn’t give me any pause, but it’s just kind of depressing that there is no longer any link to the very first pay per click provider. I remember working on GoTo.com campaigns back in 2001 before it was rebranded as Overture, before that was bought by YSM. It’s kind of amazing if you think about how Yahoo! devalued their search so completely through an amazing series of incompetent missteps.
For advertisers, your life gets somewhat easier. If you weren’t with YSM before, you’re not going to be able to open an account after this month. Really, there’s not much point in doing it now any way since that doesn’t leave you a lot of time to get a robust campaign started and running. Starting October 1, you’ll be able to reach more than 9 out of 10 US searchers with paid search advertising by just using Google AdWords and Microsoft adCenter.
As my final tribute to those salad days before Jerry Yang acted as though his only goal in life was to tank Yahoo!’s stock, I once again provide a link to my favorite and the only set of music videos featuring the personification of the three largest U.S. paid search providers, Search Engine Rap Battle. I’ve always felt a little guilty that perhaps I played a role in Yahoo! not winning the vote tally against Google, which I thought it deserved to do. When voting was still open I forwarded the site to my reps at Google who had not yet seen it and later told me it spread through their offices like wildfire. Perhaps Googlers came out en masse to ensure a win for their team?
Anyway, RIP, Yahoo! Search Marketing. I shall step outside and pour some of my diet mountain dew on the ground.
This article has 6 responses
Let’s say you were just using Adwords today, but ready to start advertising on other platforms. Would you join Yahoo Sponsored Search before Sept 30, or is there no reason to? Any others besides MAdCenter essential to advertising on?
@Jotham – Good question. I’m assuming you’re looking at US only (let me know if not), so adCenter’s a definite need.
Regarding Yahoo!, I guess it depends on how much you need the business and how long it will take you to set up the campaigns. No one seems to know for sure, but our reps are pegging the switch date toward the end of October.
So, if you already have a campaign in AdWords that you can copy over (although one of my big beefs with YSM is that they never made this easier) – or if this time period is important to you, I’d go ahead and do Yahoo! as well.
If, instead, you’re viewing this as an exploratory testing type situation for that time frame, you might as well skip it and just focus on adCenter knowing that a tripling of traffic will be coming down the pike.
Thanks for replying! Do you think this adCenter-YSM merge affects any other aspects of Yahoo’s value, for instance does it make a link in the Yahoo directory worth any less?
@Jotham – I assume you mean from an SEO / PPC Provider’s perspective and not from, say, a stock valuation.
bing is now completely powering Yahoo!’s search results, so that’s a huge difference, especially if your site was doing comparatively well or poorly with Yahoo! traffic before the merger.
How the Yahoo! Directory plays out will be interesting. I saw that have potentially huge effects in Yahoo! serps, which now is moot, but it also adds value to the other search engines and the listings get picked up by other sources, which leads to more referral traffic.