by Das Brain
Recently, I was looking into becoming an affiliate for Yahoo services, so I went to the Yahoo search marketing website to look for any information on this. First of all, it took me 10 minutes to locate any kind of link that brought me to their affiliate page.
Next I find out that you have to go through Commission Junction to be able to sign up. So I thought okay, I have a Commission Junction account I’ll just log in and sign up to be a Yahoo affiliate.
I logged in then I clicked the sign up button and I was rejected right away. The message said “you have been declined for one reason or another.” This is ridiculous I thought, here I am trying to help Yahoo get more leads for their services and they rejected me for trying to setup a mutually beneficial business connection.
Unfortunately, this is not the only problem with Yahoo when it comes to their affiliate and search marketing services. I also have a Yahoo Search Marketing account, and when I used to purchase text ads for keywords to drive traffic to one of my websites, it would take 3 days before the ad would be approved, sometimes it would be rejected entirely as well.
I like and used Yahoo services like e-mail, My Yahoo, Yahoo finance and their main Yahoo.com page for almost 10 years, but it seems like Yahoo is shooting themselves in the foot here when it comes to revenue generating and new customer acquisition services. Their is so much red tape, like waiting for 3 days to get an ad approve and not allowing website owners to easily sign up to become an affiliate.
Contrast this with Google. Google lets pretty any website webmaster to sign up for Google Adwords, and Google Adsense, thus organicly pushing higher volumes of text ads out there. Google hasn’t rejected me if I wanted to place Google referral or affilate links. Google also doesn’t take 3 days to review my Google Adwords text ads, when I want to advertise some of my websites. So, in comparison you can see how easily Google makes it for you to proliferate their products and services and text ads out there. Another example, is the FireFox referral program, by getting internet users to install FireFox with Google tools and search box they further enhance their exposure. No wonder why so many website owners are Google whores, because it’s easy to be and it works.
Jim Cramer of TheStreets.com one of my favourite financial websites recently analyzed Yahoo and said that their management needs to change. I completely agree, if Yahoo can improve efficiencies when it comes to referrals, quicker text ad approvals and less red tape and try to adopt a more Google promiscuous model then Yahoo has a chance to slowly catch up in the ad revenue game, but for now Yahoo is standing still.
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