They utterly SUCK.

This $25 Minimum Spend rubbish is a disgrace.

Here I am, an advertiser, who’s stopped PPC on Yahoo temporary for whatever-reason, and I get a nice email that I’m going to be charged $25 even though I’ve spent $0 in the month. Disgusting.

It’s no secret, Yahoo wants your money. In fact it does anything it can to GET YOUR MONEY. If you don’t even use there system in fact.

It’s old “bidding war” system is utter proof of what Yahoo will do to get your money. Just look at the pathetic emails it sends you, “make more money buy spending more on PPC at Yahoo!”. Read them, that’s the basic gist. I find it disgusting.

It’s easy to not “deactivate” your account at Yahoo and get slapped with this small, but irritating fee a month later.

P.S I don’t love Google either, in fact Google has taken more money from me than Yahoo, I just hate it less than Yahoo because Google tries not to get into such blatant profiteering practices like Yahoo (e.g. bidding war previously, all kinds of crap to keep you paying, crap newsletters about using PPC, and they know it).

Google is rich beecause of the geniuses at Google. Nothing more, nothing less. Make no mistake, Google is out for your money too. It just does it in a much more shifty/intelligent way than the pick-pocketing Yahoo.

P.S I have not lost a house on PPC, I’ve broken even basically. I see the big boys for what they are.

Ah.. here, some more quality content, these should be the new trademarks for google and yahoo:

Google: Do no (Noticable) Evil.
Yahoo: Do you (give money to) Yahoo!?

Further, YSM editors (human) sometimes think they know better and frequently reject ads where there are strings of numbers on it (TOS disallowd telephone number, but they think any string of numbers is a telephone number).

And yes, that £25 minimum usage per month annoys me. So I walked.

Moreover, studies indicate that more women use Yahoo, while men prefer Google, on average. If the product you’re pushing has a female target market, it makes sense to use YSM.

YSM’s interface is clunky…until you’ve used Ask.com, which is such complete crap that I’d never recommend it to anyone. No tech support, very limited budget control, no phone number, terrible reporting, no submission process feedback.

Yes, quite right that YSM will fail compared to AdWords, which is especially sad given overture basically invented the PPC concept.

My main point that I want to make is that ideally (unrealistic though given the competitive marketplace) I’d like the AdWords system to be applied to the entire PPC marketplace – this would include Yahoo! search market as well, but with only one single entry point and one system to control all the campaigns. Google having the best system and most interest in keeping it going, would be the best candidate to control the system at the moment.

Plus all the ramblings on the long tail and small business owners etc backs up this point.

I think it’s safe to say that right now, yes, YSM has already failed, in comparison to AdWords. It’s also failed me as a customer, at least for now.

Cheers,

JP