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Now How Much Would You Pay? (For Yahoo!)
LHOOQtius_ov_Borg writes: "A CNet article discusses Yahoo! considering more subscription-fee based premium services. The article points out that other sites, such as TheStreet.Com, have not had success with this. It also mentions that Yahoo has stated that less than 10% of their current revenue comes from 'pure play' Internet companies and 'financially questionable' advertisers.'" Added to which, ABetterRoss writes, "Submitting to some Yahoo categories is no longer free. from the FAQ: "In our ongoing effort to 1) build a useful, comprehensive Web directory and 2) address the needs of people submitting sites to the directory, we have expanded our fee-based Business Express program to cover all submissions to our main commercial categories: 'Business and Economy/Business to Business' and 'Business and Economy/Shopping and Services.'"
$1.42
---
Yeah, and if you've got a site listed there and you change your address, you can't get them to correct it for love nor money. After two years of trying, I finally just put up a forwarding page at the old site with a snide message about Yahoo's lack of currency. Feh.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
and yahoo mail is by far the best web-based free email available.
People like to bash yahoo because it is the big dog, but I suspect that we'll have yahoo to beat around for quite a while longer...
~ The Irony is, The only reason I'm not at Berkeley right now is because I was on acid during my SAT's..
just get a donation from some of the people who made millions on their stock???? I am getting sick of all the dot.coms crying in their beer because they can't make a buck.
If you have a product I can touch -- get cheaper online than down the road at the local mall -- and not bend over for S & H -- then you will get my money....Try charging me $19.95 a month for 1's and 0's that I can get somewhere else for free...Or try charging $50 bucks for a stripped down Debian (free) distribution (corel)..and wonder why the piles of money are not showing up...I laugh.
sog
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Yahoo and google are different enough that I find them both useful. Yahoo groups sites by category; if I want to look at a bunch of sites on some common subject, like say 3-d art, yahoo is my first start. If I want to do a search for something more obscure, like the exact text of an error message, I use google. I don't use google all the time because quite frankly raw search results can be extremely annoying, and just because a site has a lot of links pointing to it doesn't always make it useful.
--
i understand that the services yahoo will offer will not just be web-searching (possibly offer a net-banking ssystem, similar to Paypal/X.com, which would be viable considering how big it is...)
but if it intends on being a primarily search engine, there lies a problem: yahoo uses google's engine. can't you just go to google.com, and make the same search (minus the banners) for free?
--------------
Seriously.
It's like anything in the world that has the gall to charge money for a service is evil in Slashdot-land. How dare you try to make money on the internet. For shame..
BilldaCat
Yup, why go to a plumbing store when you can go to a pipe store, a T-fitting store, a faucet store, etc.? Face it, aggregation, whether products or information, can be extremely useful. Aggregation is done by "middlemen," and there are useful middlemen, and useless middlemen. As a matter of fact, in the "real world" the more efficent middlemen (e.g. WalMart) are getting increasingly powerful--they are hardly being "gotten rid of"--by their efficiencies in aggregating products and services in a convenient and useful way.
Another example: TV networks (cable or broadcast) aggregate programs from a variety of producers; a minority of programs are actually produced in-house. They run ads and use the proceeds to buy those programs. Some channels (e.g. HBO) charge instead; you can choose not to pay, and still get what the other channels provide. Viacom, for instance, owns both subscriber- and ad-supported channels. I don't see them all of a sudden deciding to make MTV a pay channel, do you?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but TNSTAAFL. (There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.) Aggregation has value, but it also has costs. The latter are going to get passed to you one way (advertising) or another (direct charges). If you don't find that service worth the price, go without or create your own.
What I don't understand is, can you really live off sponsors forever?
What about television stations? Granted it's a little different, but it's a fine example.
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
Why not? Local community rags have survived soley on advertising for a while now - they give them away and I get half-a-dozen each week.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
gee, if they get less entries because it costs money to enter an item, it becomes more or less
like archive of advertisements and less people go
there therefor less revenue from the ads and so
it goes!
Step forward, two back... go figure.
I've been using *.yahoo.com for 3 years now. I have taken way more service from yahoo than I have given to them. I've clicked no adds yet the services they offer mean so much to me. Here is just a subset of the things yahoo.com does for me. 1. Perminant e-mail. 2. Travel directions whenever I want. 3. Send greetings to my mother, and be reminded to do so. 4. Make bids on tarrif-free auctions. 5. Book an itinerary for the lowest possible cost. (except for SouthWest). How much would I pay for all of these things that make my life easier? $50/year. And I'm just a poor college student!
Just my 2 cents...
Anyway, the point I wanted to make was, yeah, middlement are important, but how much cost is there for an Internet middleman? Not much. Fundamentally, I think free sites can end up being just as good, because most users are willing to spend a second or two contributing back to the value of the site. Take Slashdot. Slashdot acts as a middleman for news, but most of the value is added by posters and moderators, not by those who post the articles.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I'm sure this fellow has better things to do with his time than administer a email/fax webserver. It's not about the possibility, it's about the convenience, and the reliability.
In the beginning ..
Well back in 1995 many search engines thought they were going to get by on subscription services. It didn't work so they switched to banner ads. Banner ads not working and switching subscription services? I dunno.
On the other hand, services like that Yahoo! offers a mailbox space upgrade to 25Mb for $15 a year are okay.
Seriously. If there is demand for a free ad based site, someone will fill it.. It may not be Yahoo. It may not be Slashdot. The real "eoconomy" or frontier here is bandwidth, and boxes. When starting a new site and aquiring bandwidth are the major hurdles to overcome, then, something new will happen. Internet2, SatNet, even fsck,ng packet radio, will be the new interesting place to hang. After all, the mall becomes boring after a while, right? Filled with people without purpose... There should/will always be an alternative.
Monkey lover...
It was a great idea, but they blew it.
In what ways?
Large parts of the directory sucks badly, and it is not going to improve.
Why not?--
Robin Green
ODP editall "greenrd"
Female Prison Rape in NY
It's quite normal nowadays for sites to take weeks to be reviewed - we don't have enough active editors in some areas.
The category I was trying to submit to said it needed an editor. I submitted an application and was rejected within an hour...twice.
We don't take just anyone. For instance, you have to have good spelling and grammar, you have to take due care in filling out the form, and you have to demonstrate some sort of familiarity with the subject matter.
Our metas (editor application reviewers) are hand-picked from the ranks of the long-serving editors, so they know what editing's about and they're not stupid. Since the meta has never met you, think about it - it is highly unlikely that they rejected you out of malice. Probably there was something wrong with your application.
What was the category, by the way, and what did you put on your application form (roughly)?
--
Robin Green
ODP editall "greenrd"
Female Prison Rape in NY
Disclaimer: I work in a very small company -- only a few people. I'm not expressing a capitalistic viewpoint, but a realistic one: don't judge a user of software by whether they make money from using it.
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
i was talking in reference to search engines...
Yahoo better tread carefully. There are lots of portals with alternative revune models in the wings ready to fill in should Yahoo slip: The ISP portals like MSN or AOL, the contest ones like iWon, and so on.
I've got prime real estate that I'm surprised others aren't wanting to buy off me. Type in "coffee shops" in the search box, and my link's the first one that comes up(reviews of coffee shops)
p s
http://search.yahoo.com/bin/search?p=coffee+sho
C'mon starbucks, I'll let you have it for a nominal fee. Forget a catchy domain name. Think of how many people type in "coffee shops" at yahoo.
Realizing that information can't "want" to be anything - Priceless.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Yes many haven't had success with it yet but only a few have been charging. Most of the online companies aren't turning a profit, the venture capitol has run dry. So what do you do to get some money? You charge people who visit of course. Only a few have tried this and failed so imagine if most of them had a pay-per-view type service.
I personally think that the Yahoo! submission fee is one step away from being a scam. For a while now, the only real way to get a site reviewed for Yahoo! has been to pay their fee of $199, which I've done for two sites. Both of these sites have been rejected for ambiguous reasons, with a note suggesting that I try resubmitting the site the next month. Granted, neither of these were the greatest websites online, but they were certainly better than a lot of the garbage that Yahoo! has listed.
I could understand an initial fee for listing a site, or even a recurring fee, but paying to submit a site feels like a bit of a set up to me.
Scott
EventNation.com - A site that you won't see on Yahoo!
You cant give shit away for free, and expect to make money with it
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
I love ALL children (though I have never done anything illegal with a child, if that's what you're asking).
I can't help with your daddy (and somehow I get the distinct impression you're not really a kid).
Who needs other search engines when you got google.
More choices are better choices. I'm a big google fan and don't actually use Yahoo, except for Backgammon and Hearts, but i'd be saddened if one day all the search engines died off and all that was left standing was google.
I'd sign on for something cheap, like a dollar a month. Anything more than two dollars a month would be too much. I like Yahoo's email, calendar, and notepad. I used the briefcase a LOT when I was in school. I also like My Yahoo. I use the movie showtimes list every weekend, synched with my Palm. I'm sure there's better stuff out there for all of these individual things, but Yahoo does a good job at bringing it all together. I'll put it this way : I'd pay more for Yahoo than I'd pay for Slashdot.
Here.
Fuck Slashdot
Thank you...
:)
I don't think a parent should let their child go out on a date with some guy (of any age) sight unseen. The parents should know him pretty well first.
As a side note, I think this is the fastest I've ever seen karma drop.
This stuff is not supposed to be "Funny"... Tt is supposed to be "Cry"... It is a warning about what may happen in a near future. And here don't blame the geeks, Rob or Taco if this happens. They may be quite far from here when such things may start to happen. There is a dangerous tendency coming up.
Could anyone ever imagine that we would come into this? I was here when Yahoo! came up. I saw it growing from the half-hackers site into the commercial mastodon of today. And many things look dangerously similar to Slashdot's evolution.
Rob if you don't wanna ever dream about this, think always ten times before accepting a million dollar bargain. Well, anyway, it's up to you to decide what you would like most...
There's a bit more to it than that. For a start they've been around for a lot longer than the Yahoo deal so I think it's safe to say they aren't relying on Yahoo. They also sell search capabilities to other sites (such as RedHat), and they sell licenses to use the technology in other applications.
People should be aware that they now use redirection scripts for every link in their directory - e.g. this page) - they can (and probably do) associate everything you click on with your "My Yahoo!" id.
Now would be a good time to switch to dmoz.org.
to charge us for this Web site? [grin].
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Subscription based revenue models are NOT going to succeed on the backs of individual users. Considering the bloated state of software, requiring SOTA hardware or dual CPU machines to render *reasonable* desktop performance over broadband networks, there is no money left for content.
Yahoo's nice and the question is worth asking what people will pay and for what. I do not believe that Yahoo delivers a value-added component to the content and services it hosts. I have 6 ways to Sunday to obtain info Yahoo posts.
Yahoo is convenient, reliable and trustworthy source but it is not unique, compelling and irreplacable.
Let's see, rent, car, toys, boat, utils, communications, and on top of that Yahoo? rent? I don't think so.
-r
Perhaps Yahoo is just trying to generate more revenue to pay for all the television spots they've been buying.
I think the "search industry" needs fixing if the internet is ever going to live up to its potential. The November edition of Danny Sullivan's SEARCH ENGINE REPORT makes the problem pretty evident, and I think my post to this other slashdot subject board offers the solution.
Dmoz.org is for brosing directories...
I refuse to wait up to 8 seconds for the fricken' front page. that's not reasonable. At least, not in light of cable network access..
This space reserved for a reservation message
http://www.google.com/pressre l/p ressrelease25.html...yahoo uses google...same frickin thing for the most part content delivery is different but *content* should be the same.
If Yahoo started charging for submissions, say, $5 per submission, they they could probably pay some poor intern $2.50 to review the site and make sure that it was legit, not a broken link, etc. This really isn't all that different from phone companies charging buisnesses for yellow page adds. In fact, it's fairly similar:
Everyone can be in the "white pages" (the standard list of indexed pages) but if you pay a little extra, then your buisness is more likely to be noticed first by someone searching for services....
We're not saying they shouldn't make money. We're saying they're not going to that way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It's not just because of the "free" mentality that pervades this open-source-minded user base....I think this applies to everyone.
It's that the vast majority of people have a hard time paying for something that is readily available for free elsewhere. That's why people trade MP3s instead of buying new CDs (debatable, yes, but it happens) use free operating systems, and why people will flock away from something free if it starts charging.
Making money on the internet is just fine and dandy. I'm all about capitalism. But don't be incredibly shocked folks don't come in droves to use your service that you charge for if someone else has the same service for free. You have the right to TRY and make money in a capitalist society but, if you have a bad business model, you're not earning anything but a swift Chapter 11 in the rear.
That's what's so great about the internet. You have to offer something unique and interesting that DRIVES the consumer to pay for it, or you're not gonna be around long. So far, here's what makes money: pr0n, advertising, e-commerce sites that sell software or *gasp* real physical items, dating services/locator services (helping people meet/find people), and uhh....that's about it. If you can think of anything that doesn't fall into those categories that is doing well financially, I'll buy you a steak.
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
There are several conflicting ancient economic rules that come into play with the internet. Rules that must be revised to work to the economic benefit of all.
:). If I end up posting ads for yahoo.com, all we ever do is trade the same money back and forth. Until the ads make it to a website that brings in a significant amount of its revenue from the wallets of its viewers, there is no money in the internet economy.
:) But if content could be transfered a minimum amount of hops, the cost for that content will drop significantly, as well as increasing the speed by which everyone can access it.
:)
First of all, we have the issue of free service. Everyone who browses the internet expects to do so for free or for a single low flat rate for their isp. They have come to expect this, and I doubt the internet would have taken off if they were charged for every website they wanted to view. I don't want to pay for my information.
To offer this information, it will cost somebody at least something. At the lower end, the isp of the provider can provide a low volume website, but the cost of providing the information will increase with its popularity and size. Information wants to be free, but not for those who provide it.
There has to be a constant, scalable source of revenue to cover the cost of providing the information or service. There are two major possibilities here. Sell the eyeballs of your viewers, or charge the viewers to view the information.
Advertising on the internet might work or it might not. There's a catch 22 in play here. Until the massive bulk of consumers use the internet, ads won't be as lucrative a source of revenue as advertising on the radio or TV are since a lot more people spend a lot more time watching TV then they do on the internet. And even those who DO spend a lot of time on the internet do so engaged in activities that do not subject them to a steady stream of advertising.
The biggest problem with advertising is the fact that while more and more of the people in the world are going online, the original core group of users were of a slightly different breed. The type, for all practical purposes, who don't pay much attention to ads, and spend as much time as possible trying to avoid having to view them at all (Junkbuster and the like come into play here).
On the internet advertising is also subjected to a recursive downward spiral where you end up advertising pages for the sole purpose of selling advertising. When you watch a commercial on TV, they're usually selling a meatspace product. They're not trying to sell you on another service for the sole purpose of throwing advertising on you. The obvious exception to this is when they advertise previews to upcoming shows, but self promotion is always a valid exception. Most TV networks don't make a point of advertising shows on other networks.
On the internet, I might run a website that gains 100% of its revenue from advertising. How will I bring users to my website? I might sell an ad on yahoo since I know there's a big potential audience there. Yahoo of course, gains most, if not all, of their revenue from advertising (at least until now
What this means is, E-commerce is essential for the survival of the internet as it is currently constructed. However, what if I want to provide information to the world at large and not have to pester my viewers with ads, but at the same time, not charge them any money?
This brings up a second point. Information that I serve is mine. I provide it to the world, but *I* want to be the one serving it so I get credit for it. AT least, this is the general perception. However, I can't afford any more than a dsl line without some type of revenue stream. Bandwidth gets cheaper the closer to the backbone you get, but you have to be able to purchase a LOT of bandwidth to get it that cheap.
However, say there was a bandwidth repository between me and the backbone, like at my isp. A huge cache for all of the websites and other files that transfer between the customer websites and viewers on the other end. Whenever a single static file is transfered more than a few times, the cache will pick it up and save it. From that point on, any incoming requests will stop at the isp and be served from the cache instead. If a site is extremely popular, the isp, with its much cheaper, much larger link to the internet will be the one serving all the content and the puny link to the actual website will only be used for initial transfers. Of course, keeping just one level of cache would be inefficient. If a site is REALLY popular, then it could be bumped even closer to the backbone and get served from that point. It could also work in the other direction. If a large number of people on a network access a specific website, then a local cache could store the website data locally to serve to the local users, since its much cheaper to transfer data on a local network than over the internet. This is the biggest issue with napster and college campuses. Its an order of magnitude cheaper to install more bandwidth on campus than it is to utilize the internet feed. If napster only traded files amongst users on the local network and then only went out to the internet if the requested file couldn't be found on any of the 10,000+ local systems.
However, intellectual property laws come into play here. I don't want anyone mirroring my information because I can't sell banner ads to distribute it. Of course, I can't sell banner ads anyway, but thats not really the point. This mentality ends up stalling the whole process.
Yes, I know this wouldn't work for dynamic pages. however, try something. Pick a website, especially an extremely flashy one. Point wget at it and download all the content on the main page. Then do something to form a dynamic change and repeat the process. How much of the data has actually changed? Webpage code itself is relatively small compared to the size of the images, java applets, and banner ads.
This will increase the base cost to the provider of the information or service, as you are now purchasing not only an internet connection, but also cache space. However, as you well know, its much cheaper to purchase something once than to pay for something constantly. In addition, if you can cut down your required bandwidth by 80% because most of your content need not transfer over your expensive pipe and can instead transfer over the pipe of your isp, which only costs them half as much due to their ability to purchase a much larger pipe and get a better data rate for the dollar. Not to mention the fact that the price drops even more the next jump upstream. Its not unreasonable to cut your bandwidth costs down to 10-20% of what would be needed if you served everything from your own system through your own internet feed.
The third issue is that more and more people expect a large quantity of their services to be performed for free or very little. Cell phones are free. There are free computers, free internet access, free long distance. SOMEBODY has to pay for all of this. In the end, its going to be the corporations that end up selling us products and inevitably paying our salaries. Thats how economy works. And if they're going to give away all this stuff for free, they're going to need to have more accurate marketing data so they get a better return on their investment. While I don't feel they should be automatically provided with this information without my permission, I don't feel like its too far out of line to request such information in exchange for an otherwise free product so they can push products my way that I would otherwise be interested in purchasing anyways.
So understand the perspective. We want unlimited privacy, with no intrusion into our lives whatsoever. No cookies, no anonymous tracking, no personal tracking. We don't want any random spam, no targeted advertising (still spam), no banner ads, no targeted banner ads, we want our internet service free or very low cost, with lots of extra services, but nobody calling us to sell us anything. At some point, something is going to have to give. Figure out where you want it to be. Either you're going to have to tell someone that you're a 30 year old male who has an interest in reading about cars, or you're going to have to pay yahoo money so you can do it.
-Restil
(sorry for the extended, pointless rant)
Play with my webcams and lights here
God...I'm tired of the fucking Mastercard parodies. They're not funny anymore!
While yahoo might be well known, a lot of high profile sites use DMoz's data, including Google, AOL, Netscape, and a bunch of others. It is slightly in the backround but a lot of people agree with me that it has higher quality (excepting possibly the Business category). I mean, when LookSmart wanted to get sites to use their data they had to actually pay them to give up DMoz's.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
I wouldn't pay much for Yahoo...
Now Google, I'd pay a lot for that.
>>All search engines can be bought off. This is a part of the business model, unsuccessful as it tends to be. Yeah, long term the supply of sites willing to pay will start running out and it will no longer be worth it to charge for listings. LookSmart paid Altavista a huge amount of money to use its listings and eventually those people will stop paying as well. In the end, I think (or at least hope) that most of these "directories" will stop charging.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
So Yahoo is charging now. Next thing, their stocks will go down and it'll end up disappearing.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
and while I agree that there is a lot to be desired in terms of
quality, I think there are examples of excellence in the Science
hierarchy. Yahoo, by contrast, is usually poor quality in Science.
As for your analysis of what is wrong with dmoz, I couldn't agree
more. It has also been getting worse quite quickly in recent months.
Unfortunately, the rivals to it that I know of are not credible, the
least bad being Dave Winer's ultra-lightweight HTML directories. Do
you know of any better projects?
Oh, I thought you meant, for the whole company.
OK, I must admit that I haven't looked that thoroughly through everything there. Particularily, in Biology, there is a lot of things I would have no clue about.
No, unfortunately....
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
You know what finally made me quit? For half a year, someone had submitted a portuguese language site to me. Now, I can't read much portuguese, but browsing the entire site, I could see it was a high quality site, I could see that because I'm an expert on the subject, I recognize illustrations, some nomenclature, etc. Well, I sent it over to World/Portuguese, who are short of editors, and the site remained in unreviewed for a month. The submitter submitted it again, and I sent a note apoligizing for the fact that I couldn't accept it as per the guidelines, and that it's stuck in unreviewed, and encouraged the submitter to sign up as an editor. This very knowledgeable person was rejected as an editor. This continued for half a year, with me apologizing to the submitter each time of the terrible shortcoming of dmoz. Eventually, there were so many corresponding cats in World, I made a category with links to those and decided to list this site in this cat. Well, the cat with non-english sites eventually became obsolete, and so an editall goes in and moves the site to World/Portuguese, where it is stuck in unreviewed. Naturally, the editall made no attempt to understand why the site was listed where it was. Now, I'd like her to apologize to the submitter why the high-quality site is not listed in dmoz, I can tell you, you don't feel too good about it. So, the problem is here, dmoz has to reject high quality sites because it doesn't fit in the rigid hierarchy. You know, when dealing with editalls, they usually stick so tightly to the guidelines they could be replaced very easily in most cases by a robot.It's just rational what they do. On the other hand, editalls also go around accepting low-quality sites while category editors are discussing whether the quality of a site is good enough for accepting. It's a mess, and it won't improve.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
another one bites the dust!
..
look ma its raining dot coms
i'm sure yahoo is going down too
so good luck to you when you are still up
time to switch over to google..
"The world is coming to an end. Please log orff."
I can't really sympathise. If you started editing there, why didn't you clean it up yourself? Why didn't you add sites of good quality? If there aren't any sites of good quality on history of science on the web, that's hardly ODP's fault. If there are, why didn't you add them?
It should be apparent to anyone knowledgeable in the history of science that this category is of very bad quality.
Care to elaborate? I'm not very knowledgeable in the history of science, but it looks okay to me. The main category is full of odds and ends, but you've got to expect that when most sciences fit into neat little boxes - all you're left over with is the obscure things and things that don't fit. Apart from the inclusion of phrenology (hah!) I can't see anything wrong with it (the main category, that is).
Female Prison Rape in NY
I hate to be a troll, but does anyone use yahoo anymore when google search is so much better? Yes I understand Yahoo has other services, but there are other sites that do those services better than yahoo. (e.g. Yahoo Auctions vs Ebay, etc )
I know I sure don't especially since the web results come from google, which has it's own website...
-B
~...Don't trade our love for Tea and Sympathy~ - Jars of Clay
It was awhile ago, I haven't used DMOZ in some time unless it's associated with google somehow. Anyways, it was for a home-improvement section. I don't really remember much about the application...just the fact that I was rejected..:) As far as being familiar with the subject matter, I run a home improvement web site. Perhaps my rejection was due to conflict of interest? Dunno, there wasn't a reason included....
I think that this idea might fly for Yahoo....i don't see why they would want to do this since they already have money coming out their ears....but because of the huge popularity and all the yahoo diehards...i think they could potentially make some money. You know there are some misinformed business people out their that base decisions soley on name recognition....I disagree with doing this, and i think it is dumb, but I also think they will make a ton of money off of this and I would not be bothered in the least bit to be in their shoes right now.
The anti-salmon
OK, so they want to charge money, but not deliver content? Why would I pay Yahoo to 'aggregate' content, if I could do the aggregation myself and maybe even pay the content CREATORS.
Yahoo just wants to be a paid middle man? We're getting rid of those from the real world. Why do we want to create them on the internet?
---
Actually, I think that google gets most of it's money from Yahoo!, so if they go down, Google goes down. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.
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I'm not really interested in boys (though many other people are, and would probably like your friend, even if he is what your age group would sonsider a "dork"). I'm a guy, but there ARE female pedophiles also.
Yahoo are charging for REVIEWS of sites. Raw additions to their index are (it appears) still being done for free.
In addition, they are charging for reviews of ALL commercial sites that fit into certain categories.
What's the problem here? The same fee is being charged to all businesses. Regardless of the businesses size, the review will be completed within seven days.
Sites that don't go into those categories still get in for free (albeit in a unknown timeframe).
They're being sensible and not charging VISITORS to the sites. How is this different from a TV network?
It's not uncommon to have a crush on a teacher, but there's not usually anything you can do about it.
A very interesting site can be found at www.allaboutsex.org (it's for kids, very interesting)
(I replied this in the wrong place...)
It's not uncommon to have a crush on a teacher, but there's not usually anything you can do about it.
A very interesting site can be found at www.allaboutsex.org (it's for kids, very interesting)
Sort of...
I just got a eLink device (RiM 850 pager) that runs Yahoo. Mail, messenger, WML browser, plus the RiM built-ins like calendar and address book. Flat rate of $35 a month. So far, it seems pretty cool. My only wish is that AOL would wake up and allow AIM to interoperate with other messaging platforms, like Yahoo.
But the point of this story is that there are value-adds that Yahoo can provide that are worth paying for. I'm going to be using this for work instead of a pager. It's much more useful, and cheaper (as far as I've seen).
-Todd
---
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
that said, fees for huge subsections (say IBM or Microsoft) where everything is mapped out in grand detail, that I can see.
but they should be featured is a special section so you know what they are, specific commercial listings.
beyond that, not a big deal.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Given that, I don't know why is everyone so surprised that Yahoo! wants to charge. What I don't understand is, can you really live off sponsors forever? Eventually, I see all these services charging... How else are they supposed to feed those large teams of programmers?
Can you go to the grocery store and get stuff for free? Hell no. I know there's alternatives, as in, you can grow your own veggies (e.g. pot ;-), or visit a non-paying search engine, but eventually, doesn't it boil down to the old adage - "you pay, you play?"
Napster won't wither because of "don't kill the messenger", but sure as f**k we all knew that everyone on there has pirated at least ten songs, if not more. So, how can Napster stand to make any profit just by letting everyone share files? I dont get it.. They have to start charging some measly fee..
I know it isn't nice to take away something that was given for granted (free), but I just cannot comprehend or better yet, visualize, how are these companies supposed to make money unless they start charging? Can you put yourself in their shoes, i.e. it was your company.. Would you settle for no or little money? Would you like to make MORE money and expand? Well, just how are you gonna do that by letting people spread pirated songs and not charging them something for the service and fend off the RIAA with the revenue/profits?
Someone explain to me the basics of capitalism, 'cause I apparently, the C.S. graduate, is clueless ;->.
Thank you.
--
'A lie if repeated often enough, becomes the truth.' - Goebbels
It won't work. I hate paying $20 per month for anything. I can't believe that companies think this will work.
I look forward to the time when companies large and small begin to understand that people are not interested in handing out monthly checks for every service that's offered.
Vanguard
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
Don't be too rash now. You can get them to correct it for money -- in fact, that's what this article is largely about. They may start charging for businesses to enter their listings: if you don't pay, according to Yahoo you don't exist.
All search engines can be bought off. This is a part of the business model, unsuccessful as it tends to be.
For more information, click here.
It is sad that sites like yahoo and looksmart have to go to charging for listings in order to get money. They should not do this but instead focus on creating quality directories that will give people reason to return. Making people pay for listings compromises their integrity by causing bad sites to be potentially listed while not listing good sites that might not want to fork over the money.
Also, people who find out about this questionable business method might question the accuracy of the search results and stop using sites like this. Yahoo should do something like google, which sells ads but not listings, as they are in a different color and distinct from normal searches (although google is a search engine, not a directory).
I did not submit my business site to yahoo when I saw they were asking money for the submission. I also removed yahoo.com from my toolbar and bookmarks. I do not support pay-to-play, and I hope to god I am not alone. I would be OK with the idea of paying to have pictures put beside my directory listing, or other ways of making my name stand out (like the telephone directories do) but I won't pay just to list.
As far as I'm concerned yahoo is no longer useful to me if they only accept entries for companies that do enough business online to warrant paying for a listing. My company website is really just a reinforcement to my other marketing methods. I very rarely buy things online. I usually am just looking online to find out things like: what is their phone number, what is their email address, what type of image do they project, or (most often) tech support or product information. I can't justify paying to have our website listed when I make zero revenue from it.
Conversely, if I know that the only sites listed on yahoo.com are businesses that pay to get listed, the value of using yahoo drops to zero. Many of the sites I want to see will not be listed.
I'll use google instead thanks.
for those of you who are wondering what my business is that I don't sell online, I'm a custom jeweller
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
I think that if the entries are not overly priced and only where appropriate then it could improve Yahoo's functionality for the user.
If applied only to the business section and the price per year was say, equal to or less than the cost of a domain registration, it would sort out the serious businesses from the con artists. A small fee such as that is nothing for a legitimate business and this would mean that all Yahoo business results were people who were obviously serious about doing business with the consumer.
If however, rankings were sold, as Altavista was planning on, then the idea would be preposterous. It should also only be applied to categories for businesses, if somebody wants to add a page about how they take care of their pet then it is ridiculous to think of charging them.
If done right, adding a small fee for registration where appropriate could make Yahoo the one-stop shopping search engine for most.
I have asked Yahoo, if I could pay them some money in order to get rid of the advertisements in all the e-mails I send and in order to get my correct e-mail address as sender e-mail address instead of the Yahoo! e-mail address.
I am willing to pay $1000 a year for that. I really mean it. Yahoo! does my attachment virus scanning, receives all my faxes via a free U.S. fax number, stores my e-mail so I can access it worldwide, manages spam e-mail and I have never been without e-mail since I started to use Yahoo! e-mail.
I cannot get the same service level anywhere else, but because I use it for business, the advertisements are a real problem.
The obvious alternative for Yahoo! mail is:
- Set up a Microsoft Exchange server
- Get a fixed internet access
- Set up a web-interface for the Exchange server
- Set up a firewall
- Hire somebody to administer the Exchange server
- Hire somebody to keep the firewall up-to-date
- Set up virus scanning software and keep it up-to-date
- Get some fax software, that can put the faxes into Exchange server.
I cannot do that for $1000 a year.
"we have expanded our fee-based Business Express program to cover all submissions to our main commercial categories - namely anything under our .com domain" A spokesperson for Yahoo.com said today.
FP
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Comment removed based on user account deletion
TNSTAAFL. (There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.)
It's from 'the moon is a harsh mistress' and it is
tanstaafl - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch,
the first a is significant because the acronym is pronounced tan staff el. just thought you might like to know.
Oh, I did. The category had high quality for a period, and the cooperation between the three listed editors were good. But, when you spend most of your time educating editalls, who in spite of getting an lengthy e-mail with explanations and references to contemporary research continue to add sites that suck either after ignoring the e-mail or responding "who cares if the site suck, every submitted site has got a right to be in dmoz", or something to that effect, well it's time to take a hint and retire.
See? Exactly my point! I bet it looked okay to the editalls who did this too, but they weren't wise enough to stay away.... :-) Well, since you have been wise enough to stay away, you're not really the subject of my flames. When you grant someone power who has little knowledge to tie up those who have, there is not going to be peer review. Well, the answer to your question is no, I have elaborated this to death in the foras, and if you'd care to improve dmoz, you could search for my user id there.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Sure. Most site placement experts rate a placement at Yahoo higher
than a placement at DMoz, though, so that suggests Yahoo's reputation
is worth more than all the others put together.
Not likely anytime soon. They're sitting on 1.34 billion dollars in assets - about half in cash (American billion - thousands of millions, not the old British billion - millions of millions), and currently making profits: 25 million last quarter, 65 million in 2nd quarter and 77 million in the 3rd.
as I'm paying right now.
Absolutely nuttin'
--kwerkey
Obviously it would be inane for Yahoo to start charging to search the web, send email, or do anything else you can already do for free on yahoo and other sites.
What you are probably looking at is broadband content services similar to things shaping up at web music sites such as MP3.com, and Napster, as well as broadband video.
I personally am convinced that people will pay for content if it is quality, and delivered better than what is otherwise freely available - not sure if this pans out with the rest of the users out there or not. We'll see.
I wouldn't pay much at all for yahoo. Its directory project is far inferior to that of dmoz.org (Humans Do It Better!). A lot of yahoo's categories have 404's and sites that have been discontinued as well as sites without descriptions. You might find a few of those at the ODP but not many comparitively.
It is sad that sites like yahoo and looksmart have to go to charging for listings in order to get money. They should not do this but instead focus on creating quality directories that will give people reason to return. Making people pay for listings compromises their integrity by causing bad sites to be potentially listed while not listing good sites that might not want to fork over the money.
Also, people who find out about this questionable business method might question the accuracy of the search results and stop using sites like this. Yahoo should do something like google, which sells ads but not listings, as they are in a different color and distinct from normal searches (although google is a search engine, not a directory).
On another note, at least yahoo is not quite as stupid as looksmart, in that it only charges for business categories. Businesses might be able to fork over a bunch of money for listings but personal homepages that might have the most devoted people and highest quality (no commercial motivation) wouldn't pay money that often.
"I have not failed. I've simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." --Thomas Edison
I'm sure many people will complain about Yahoo charging money for adding sites to its directory, but here's a better idea than complaining on Slashdot: go to the Open Directory Project and start participating. Be an editor, or just submit links. The better the ODP gets the less often I (and you) will have to go to Yahoo. Even Google partners with the ODP. Shouldn't you?
create your own? That way, if you want to keep it free, you can. It's Yahoo's prerogative to charge whatever they want, and the market will decide what is successful.
The only Yahoo service I use is their mail-redirection, and that's because I may have to change ISPs every so often. (my listed address just bounces mail to my 'real' address.)
o/~ All God's children shall be free in Pirates of the Caribbean, when we reach that Magic Kingdom in the sky... o/~
I like it more than anything.
Wow. Imagine actually trying to generate revenue by *selling* services. There are some things you pay for, and some things you don't. (www.join4free.com). Caveat Emptor, etiam non pro email vendant :).
"Blow up your TV/Throw away your paper/
Move to the country/Build you a home"
io hymen hymnaee io
io hymen hymnaee
Nothing. But if I had a choice between two ISPs, and one came bundled with Yahoo! and the other didn't, that might influence my decision.
Of course I'd be paying for it indirectly, and that would make the ISP look a lot like AOL. As a general rule, I've shunned ISPs that offer premium content, so now that I think of it, the ISP offering Yahoo! wouldn't win me.
At this point the only thing I really use them for is the free finance stuff. If they close that off, I'll just use my broker stuff more. Their finance pages are great; they should license that software to brokers, who would probably pay good money to give their users something with which they are already familiar.
Actually... their charts use GNUplot. If they sold the software to brokers, they'd have to GPL that part, maybe even the whole thing.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
GeoCities Account: $5
Yahoo! Clubs Account: $25
Being able to search for pr0n by category: $100
Knowing that you can get all that stuff for free at other websites: Priceless.
There are some things that money can't buy. For everything else, there's a Yahoo! CEO who wants to bilk my grandma.
Everybody keeps mentioning "I like google better anyway". Well, google doesn't offer free email, chat, etc...
These are the "free" services that everybody has been expecting to become less profitable. People are becoming immune to banner ads and furthermore they have less site-loyalty than they used to, which makes your advertising ability less powerful.
With your rampant "screw that, its not free like my pet OS", you might be giving up ALL the internet luxuries that you enjoy. If yahoo goes under, investors will notice. And not every company is going to make a linux version of their chat client (like yahoo does).
Oh screw it, everything should be free. I'm alive, I MUST deserve it...
I suppose I'm not too threatening, presently, but wait till I start Nautilus
You're right. Aggregation has value in some markets and the search engine market is clearly one of them. However, for the service to have value it has to be at least as good as others in the field (unless you have a monopoly). This is the problem with yahoo. It isn't as good as many others. I don't know whether it was/is their algo or the organization of the directory but IMO google bypassed them long ago. I just don't get great results when searching yahoo. Yahoo does have a very strong brand name but that too is being eroded somewhat by companies like ask and google.
I tried good old DMOZ awhile ago and quickly left. The sites I have submitted in the past (several times) seem to just disappear into the ozone and never make it into the directory. The category I was trying to submit to said it needed an editor. I submitted an application and was rejected within an hour...twice.
This is something that is bound to happen eventually. It is highly unlikely that ANY company will be able to survive PURELY on advertising. I'm glad a company is trying to become profitable, and trying old methods rather than just looking for something new all the time. The only reason it flawed before was the whole "dot-com" rush. Companies would sell their employees souls to get customers, and giving away free services cost them little, and gave them great results. Now that companies are *gasp* forced to make a profit, this is now a feasible way of making money.
All children should be loved, the world would be a better place!
Yahoo had a role, earlier. Now? It's just old news. I wouldn't pay a dime to access Yahoo.