They say if you do not own or control the domain, ie you are an affiliate, the only way to link directly is if you have co-branded the landing page with your company name and you add your company name in the ad's title and description.

[help12.marketingsolutions.yahoo.com...]

Nevertheless I continue to see many ads that I know are run by affiliates get approved that do not meet one or more of these conditions. So either they do not enforce it consistently or some reviewers think the submitter is the actual company and not an affiliate so they approve the ad.

[edited by: Kobayashi at 1:45 am (utc) on April 26, 2007]

Hey “guyguy10”,

Thanks for your feedback.

For more information on our policy regarding ownership and affiliates, please visit the following link:

[help.yahoo.com...]

Hope this helps.
YahooPete

Forget the affiliates asking for a minute... if a merchant comes to you (Yahoo) and asks you to permit direct-to-merchant ppc, will you allow it?

I have merchants all the time, that I sell tons for, asking me why I can't help them more at Yahoo... and my answer is... because Yahoo says no.

If the merchant and affiliate want this arrangement, why in the world does Y say no? Who benefits by your policy? Not the affiliates, the merchants, the consumers, Yahoo's shareholders or Yahoo itself...

As a ppc consultant, I have at times worked with merchants who want to pay me on a performance basis - so affiliate links are the fastest way to set up my pay system... it's the merchants ppc spend and their YAHOO ACCOUNT, but my expertise driving their keywords, ads and more... in this case i've been hired by the merchant to run their ppc and i tell them i won't use Yahoo because the only way i can get my links approved is to write a bunch of code to do client-side redirects and even that gets turned down at Y many times.

I do know one entity that likes the Y ownership policy... Google and their shareholders.

By not acknowledging the complex relationships and tracking mechanisms that can be put in place by the owner of the site, Y is choosing to limit themselves in many ways. If shareholders understood the situation, I think the defenders there of this policy would lose their job.

Why isn't their a bean counter at Y somewhere screaming about third-party ppc agency revenue and affiliate revenue that Y is leaving on the table? Making it hard to advertise isn't the goal, or is it?