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02/21/02
The (Deliberate) Narrowing of the Internet
by Jennifer Trewitt
Well, after several years of raising directory costs, it's finally happened – Yahoo! has changed its directory into an advertising-based online yellow pages. Not that they're calling it that, but with a required annual fee, it's pretty close. Granted, $299/year is cheaper than any paper yellow pages I've seen, but when you buy a listing in a paper yellow pages, you're guaranteed to get a listing. You're even guaranteed that it will say what you want it to say, and look how you want it to look. With Yahoo!, you're paying for them to consider your listing, and they have complete control over whether to include your site, what to title it, and what description and keywords will be associated with it. And the only "appeal" process is to send one email to one additional editor who happens to be in charge of a higher-level category than the one you submitted to.
I understand that a business needs to make money, and not everything can be free. I have no problem with the banner ads that already cover Yahoo!. I also have no problem with Yahoo!'s sponsored links, which cost at least $50 per month (many categories cost over $500 per month) and appear before any directory listing. They're clearly marked as sponsored links, and I've never seen more than three of them in a category, so "ordinary" listings appear on the same page. I'm even resigned to the fee for "rapid inclusion", or paying to have your site reviewed faster than others. After all, we live in a "you-get-what-you-pay-for" society.
However, charging an annual fee just to be considered for inclusion bothers me considerably. If I'm paying an annual fee for something, I consider that to be advertising, and I expect something in return. Overture (formerly GoTo.com) has a pay-per-click scenario, and it's very straightforward. You agree to pay a certain amount for every person who clicks on your link, and in return you are guaranteed a placement relative to your bid. You get what you pay for. Yahoo!, on the other hand, requires annual payment for one human editor to look at your site. That's all you get.
It makes you wonder how concerned Yahoo! is about delivering a valuable product. They certainly believe it's important to be recognized as the leader in their field, and the site with the largest audience worldwide (see Yahoo!'s press release of 02/12/02 - http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release936.html). But they don't appear to be concerned with offering a true guide to the Internet, just the narrow portion of it that is willing to pay for (potential) exposure. Even more interesting, at the time I was researching for this article (in February, 2002), Yahoo! had 15 posted positions in Sales and Sales Operations, and none for editorial positions or content evaluation. This leads me to conclude that the powers that be at Yahoo! consider sales to be a significantly higher priority than content, which will inevitably affect the quality of their content.
Some interesting questions are raised by the new annual fee format. For example, how will the value of Yahoo! searches be affected? What will the impact be on Yahoo!’s usefulness to the consumer? Who will be disenfranchised because the cost is prohibitive? Who will be left out of the directory even after paying their fee for consideration?
I'll make the following predictions:
- Large businesses will pay the fee consistently, and their sites will then be re-evaluated every year, so their listings and search terms will be relevant.
- Smaller businesses that were lucky enough to submit prior to the fee change(s) will keep their current listing without updates, and eventually their sites' positions will drop far enough down in the search results as to be essentially useless.
- Smaller businesses that are not yet listed on Yahoo! will elect not to pay for consideration, and their sites will not be in the directory at all.
- Any business already listed on Yahoo! that requests a change in site url, title, or description will be ignored until and unless they sign up for the annual fee program.
- A number of websites will continue to be rejected from the directory despite having paid their consideration fees.
But, what will be the long-term end result? That depends upon the discrimination of the consumer.
Perhaps (my personal best-case scenario) online searchers will start to realize that Yahoo! is essentially a yellow pages for large businesses and will turn to other Search Engines or Directories when they're looking for something on the internet. Perhaps enough businesses will refuse to pay the fee, and Google listings will move higher in Yahoo! searches until the Yahoo! directory becomes defunct. Perhaps Yahoo! will find that fewer businesses are submitting and revert back to a one-time fee. Or, as has been so often the case in the past, business owners will shrug and find a way to pay the fees, and consumers will shrug and believe that there's no better solution for online searches. If that's the case, then despite the continued growth of the Internet, the scope of the average user's experience will shrink, and another barrier will be set in the way of realizing the potential of the Internet.
Unfortunately, I feel that the last scenario is the most likely. I say this because Yahoo! has been clever in their process – first their fees for consideration were optional, then required for businesses, now a subscription is required for businesses. Undoubtedly the next step is to require personal pages to pay a "modest fee" for consideration, followed by non-profits. Meanwhile, the cost for business sites will continue to rise. As long as the changes happen in increments, consumers are fairly likely to accept them and simply make adjustments, without looking at the bigger picture (Case in point: less than a year ago it was possible to get a business site included in the Yahoo! directory free of charge. Now it costs $299/year, and no one seems to notice the enormity of this increase in cost).
The bottom line is that Yahoo! is desperately trying to use their Internet Search to fund other portions of their portal (like free email accounts). Inevitably the quality of their Directory and the relevance of their listings will decline as a result. What remains to be seen is whether consumers will accept advertising disguised as information, or choose to go elsewhere.
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