PPC blog - Pay Per Click Blog

eWhisper posted some insider info about YSM over at WMW, but the thread requires a membership. So go to his site for read about it for free.

A quick summary is that they are planning on doing a massive overhaul of their existing system that has not changed in years.

Here are the main things that will change:

• Account structure will be like that of google.
• Bidding will be more like google, mainly in that it will be performance based, using CTR data.
• They will also be adding a bunch of tools like that of MSN Labs.
• They are also supposed to add geotargeting which would be a huge step, since now you can only target by country, and to do so you need an account per country!
• The other nice thing is that they say they will leave bidding open, meaning you can see what your competitors are paying.

This is great and should be helpful to anyone using the system, especially those trying to exploit it (c:

Now if they would only kill some partner relationships like the douchebags who run searchnut.com. Thanks for 30x the traffic of yahoo itself!

Oh Snap! It seems like the shit may have hit the fan a bit for YSM / Overture today. Apparently there is a class action lawsuit that has been filled against Yahoo for participating in click fraud. I found the article in the Washington post by the way of webmaster world.

An interesting point in the article is that it seems like Yahoo would poor on the clicks when their quarterly reporting was due, which is a brilliant strategy by them…but shady as hell. It will be interesting to see how this pans out. Advertisers have been bitching for as long as I can remember about how crappy the traffic is from Yahoo and that it has only gotten worse as time goes on.

Numerous complaints about pay per click arbitrage as well as one page domain landers have been posted all up and down the overture forum at WMW. About a week or so some dude put out some 10 minute long video documenting how wrong all this stuff is…found here at youtube.com.

The funniest thing is that GrayWolf put out a how to article (actually a series) on how to do pay per click arbitrage on his blog in a three part series. I, II, III

So there you have both sides of the fence…those complaining about the practice, and those showing you how to do it. What are your thoughts on this whole mess? How do you think this will affect the future of the pay per click market and what do the engines need to do in order to stop this?

Welcome to pay per click blog, a resource for news, reviews, tips and pointers for the various pay per click search engines.

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