It was only a matter of time!

Y! and MSN have similar market shares in a lot of countries (if anything MSN is lower). As MSN Adcenter is rolled out and ROI is analysed, marketeers are understanding the current YSM! model.

Google stock also took a hit on this news - brushes and tarring comes to mind!

ScottG13,

I totally agree, 10 out of 10 advertisers I speak with see little or no results from Yahoo. Furthermore most folks I speak with have cut their yahoo budget way back, some have given up on Yahoo all together.

So we all see it and Yahoo refused to see it. How does it make any sense?

Yahoo, drop your partners and we will spend

I totally agree with everyone here. I used to spend a thousand a day. Now it's $2 a day. If they gave you the option to opt out of their partners I'd start spending again. It's really that simple.

The longer they wait to allow opt out of their partner network, the more damage they do.

I concur with this assessment. Quality / ROI continues to erode.

While we endure painstaking reviews of individual keywords in the name of quality, on the other end, our dollars are fed to welcomed dragons.

Yesterday I was at a conference/tradeshow for Online Marketing. I talked about half an hour with the product manager for Austria and Switzerland and told him all of my complaints, my bad experiences and shared my frustration with Overture. He wasn't able to come up with a single concept or a single workaround for my issues. All he told me was that in the near future things will change dramatically. I told him that "near future" for me means "still this year" and he told me that this is not his definition of "near future".

> yahoo drop partners.

We need to deal with this, because it isn't going to happen any time soon. Yahoo can't drop partners - they are locked into agreements. They also get way too much traffic ($$) from them.

That said - Panama sounds like it is going to address alot of this.

> Why did the stock drop so much?

The weakest sector of an economy in a weak economy is advertising. It is the first to get cut as discretionary business spending. So when a major advertising venue talks about weak results, it is the first to get the hit from traders.

I'm not asking them to drop partners. I couldn't care less who they partner with. I'm simply asking to be allowed to direct my ad spend to the domains I do best with. Why would I want to advertise on faster-results.com? They don't convert. I know this. Does Yahoo? I frankly don't care. Allow me to put domains into a little list and they become blackout for my advertising. My spend will triple in one day.

If I want to take out a full page ad spread in the New York Times, do I have to do the same for the Boston Globe because they are owned by the same company? Of course not. The Yahoo braintrust does not comprehending this basic concept of advertising is embarrassing.

The fact that Yahoo does NOT do this makes me question their ability to uphold their fiduciary duties to their stock holders.

> direct my ad spend to the domains I do best with.
> If I want to take out a full page ad spread in the New York Times,

If it is an ad buy on NBC nationwide, you can't direct which local markets get, and don't get your commercial.

None of this has anything what-so-ever to do with the price of Yahoo stock.

> direct my ad spend to the domains I do best with.
> If I want to take out a full page ad spread in the New York Times,

If it is an ad buy on NBC nationwide, you can't direct which local markets get, and don't get your commercial.

None of this has anything what-so-ever to do with the price of Yahoo stock. This thread is just yet-another-excuse for would be advertisers to whine about the quality of Yahoo's clicks. (which - ahem, they need to start listening too and addressing).

If they are unable or unwilling to drop partners then advertisers should be given a choice on which partners their ads are going to appear on.

I get so sick of finding crap sites that aren't even relevant to our business running our ads it's not even funny. It's gotten so bad on other SE's too that we dropped all content match results.

Advertisers are seeing an increasingly poorer ROI out of a crappy Yahoo network partners, especially since a highly converting MSN left.

Advertisers have thusly shifted $$$ to MSN as well as decreased YSM spend.

Yahoo financial chief sees this and reports "lower end of guidance" warnings.

Stock sheds 12%.

We predicted this on the board months ago.

Also, way to change my message subject.

If it is an ad buy on NBC nationwide, you can't direct which local markets get, and don't get your commercial.

IMO, if the Y! deals were on a fixed fee CPM basis (user population determined by statistical projection of the audience), rather than CPC (where you really have no control over who or what clicks), everyone would get better ROI. The reason why the NBC deals work is because advertisers are being charged in accordance with the size and demographics of the audience they expect to get.

We need to deal with this, because it isn't going to happen any time soon. Yahoo can't drop partners - they are locked into agreements. They also get way too much traffic ($$) from them.

So we need to pay for the bad agreements that they sign with bad partners that generate nothing but fraudulent clicks?

we are dealing with that, we stop spending

None of this has anything what-so-ever to do with the price of Yahoo stock.

So why is Google not going down? 406.85 +9.85 (2.48%) 21 Sep at 4:00PM ET

> So we need to pay

No - that is the point - you can vote with your pocket book.

edit: never mind. i changed my mind about posting this info.

[edited by: Murfman at 12:25 pm (utc) on Sep. 22, 2006]

I moved 98% of my advertising away from them a couple of years ago.

Until they give me the option of 'only yahoo' (In the U.S. ONLY), they'll never get the other 98% back.

Maybe they'll eventually figure out who their 'partners' really are....

I'm not asking them to drop partners. I couldn't care less who they partner with. I'm simply asking to be allowed to direct my ad spend to the domains I do best with. Why would I want to advertise on faster-results.com? They don't convert. I know this. Does Yahoo? I frankly don't care. Allow me to put domains into a little list and they become blackout for my advertising. My spend will triple in one day.

If you were allowed to filter based on domain name, and you filtered domains that didn't convert, but the domains were transferred to other parties that would convert, how would you discover this? As I understand, this is one reason why some companies don't offer this feature.

IMO, the problem is dodgy partners, more so than a lack of filtering. However, as long as there isn't a mass exodus of advertisers, or a lawsuit with real teeth (ie. one where the engine/network can't just appease the plaintiffs with an out-of-court settlement), the problem will continue.

I agree with everyone here basically. We have dropped our ads by 1/2 in the past year and now ready to go down to a trickle now that we finally are getting some action from MSN.

Yahoo take head... we used to spend thousands per day and now we are under a hundred and going down not up.

You are playing a dangerous game by protecting your spammy so called partners while ignoring clients who are not as stupid as you assume we are.

I just completed some further ROI studies for my campaigns running on the Yahoo network only (not content match) and they're not running advanced match. These revealed further erosion as well and I've reduced my spend by another 50%. Having tried to focus on just the most controlled locations, I'm very disappointed to see this happen. I've known content was contaminated and that advanced match meant too many irrelevant imps, but this latest study across several markets is a real letdown. As we advertisers act in response to Y's inability and unwillingness to screen and monitor ad distribution partners, their revenues will continue to decline along with their stock price. If you check your referral urls, it's easy to see that having content match turned off no longer keeps the muck level down - Y's just moving more and more junk into their "search" category.