it's yahoo's distribution partners. bid prices for all the highest value terms have been slashed.

seems to me that it started to get pretty bad around september of '05 and then really blew up once msn was out.

I'm not surprised. I typically don't even bother setting up any new campaigns on Yahoo because of the INSANE keyword rejection rate.

We've seen conversion value for YSM(US) traffic go down 10-11% since Nov '05. Much of this is due to MSN pulling back traffic from YSM, but some seems to be due to lower-quality distribution partners becoming a bigger piece of YSM's pie. That said, Yahoo is still the only solid #2 to AdWords, with MSN still a ways off in terms of volume.

-Shorebreak

For one high-priced word I bid on: Two years ago the price at Overture was 3 times what it was at Google AdWords. Now, it's 3 times as high at Google as at YSM. And the price at Google hasn't changed much. It's mostly a massive collapse in the price at YSM.

Mostly this is due to YSM's acceptance of many low quality affiliates. They lost MSN and made up for it with what look like fraud factories.