What did Yahoo do now?!

So if you’ve been on the internet at all in the last few months, or even turned on a news cannel on TV, you’ve heard about the Yahoo fiasco and ‘fightin’ words from Carl Ichan. Well as in my last post, I talked about “Why Yahoo is F**ked” and explained most of the problems facing them and few suggestions for fixing them. Well just wait to hear what’s happing now.

Yahoo signed a deal with Google (their BIGGEST COMPETITOR) to show Google ads on Yahoo search results. The deal is that Yahoo can choose what to show, where and when. Well great, they laid the seeds for Google to start taking over more features and eventually take over the whole company. But anyway, this week I got more news about Yahoo pay-per-click account. They are raising the minimum bids for most of my keywords! What?! Not only is this unnecessary, the bids are HIGHER than the minimum bids on Google for the same keywords. Here are some examples of what I’m facing:

Keyword: “debbie meyer green bags” My old bid: $0.20 The new minimum: $0.30

Keyword: “food storage” My old bid: $0.15 The new minimum: $0.42

Keyword: “carpet stain removal” My old bid” $0.32 The new minimum: $0.95

So I am a little ticked off to be frank about it. And what is my response? Bye-Bye Yahoo. Why spend money for a program that does not show anywhere near the same ROI as Google and is owned by a company that seems to be doing everything wrong? I’m going to close my Yahoo account and open an Account with MSN AdCenter. Earlier this year, Yahoo made up about 19% of all search engine usage in the US and MSN was about 12.5%. The way things are going, I expect to see Yahoo’s share fall and MSN’s grow. So I’m going to MSN (and of course keeping Google Adwords).

This is really a shame because Yahoo has a lot of great features that I like and think are important for them to stay competitive, such as Yahoo Answers. A great resource and asset to the company that keeps thousands of users on Yahoo for long periods of time. The email isn’t as clean as Gmail, but they recently redid the design, but while doing so did not make a dramatic enough change to scare away the users that were used to the old design. This is extremely important and shows that Yahoo is, (or was) trying to keep their old customers while at the same time trying to attract new ones.

Yahoo is not down and out just yet, but they are down and it will take a lot to pick them back up. I just can’t wait to see what they do next so I can post about that.