Microsoft is spending a lot of money creating useful tools for advertisers, and when you go to their tools page they list contextual ads for “all the data mining”. If they would just let me know what that ad placement costs I am betting I would be willing to pay more than that thin arbitrage site pays. But I would pay much less than what it would be worth just to keep their tool pages clean so they can help build market adoption.
One of the ads on Microsoft’s ad tools page offers to repair Microsoft products (which hints that Microsoft’s stuff is broken), while another ad is marginally relevant and leads to a no value arbitrage domain (IndustrialProducts.com) which redirects to another site syndicating Yahoo ads.
Then when the user appears on the thin arbitrage site Microsoft is buying the click back to market their own products.
Let us appreciate this brilliance:
- paying advertisers to cheapen their brand and pollute your core product pages in important verticals with irrelevant spammy low (or no) value offers
- sending away more traffic than they get back
- losing money on the transaction
I have ranted about Yahoo! killing their keyword tool and doing nothing to rebrand or repair it, simply wasting thousands or millions of dollars worth of leads and marketshare each day. Disclaimer: my keyword tool just broke too, but I am trying to get it fixed ASAP. Yahoo! has other areas where they can offer you useful recommendations, but chose not to.
If you ever submit a site to the global Yahoo! Directory on the thank you page they recommend submitting your site to regional directories if your site is in multiple languages.
- That upsell offer is irrelevant for most people submitting their websites, and
- Yahoo! killed express inclusion for many of their regional directories years ago. The landing pages for the regional Yahoo! Directory submissions are broke. They do not even allow me to spend money if I want to.
