Linda Rocco and Kyle Yamnitz are right on the money
about GoTo's recent gouge.
The notion of a "modest price increase" is patently
ludicrous. Prices (bids) have been on the increase
since 1998, and are now quite expensive for hotly
contested keywords. Has anybody priced banner ad
rates on GoTo lately? Not cheap. If GoTo's books
aren't in the black it'd have to be due to the
embezzlement of the century. I'm not buying any of
their justifications for the nickel minimum and
account maintenance fee. More at raw, shameless
greed, or something more sinister. Maybe Linda has it
figured right -- a purposeful move to cull-out the
small biz advertisers. But doesn't small business
represent something like 80-90% of e-commerce? If
GoTo becomes a ghost town, they will have richly
deserved it.
The canned response I received when I issued my first
salvo of soldierly language about the gouge would have
been comical had the subject been less serious.
Essentially, two of the three suggestions to help me
adjust and stay happy were a classic example of circular
logic. 1) Eliminate the lower click-thru volume keywords
and concentrate on the ones that are more popular, and
2) Look for alternative keywords that are less expensive.
[You mean like lower click-thru volume keywords?] Witless.
As September approaches, I'll be cancelling the automatic
deposit functions for all the client sites I manage in
GoTo that are grandfathered, and will refuse out of
principle to establish any new accounts with them. When
the escrow pools run dry, bye-bye.
Whoever was the genius behind those two decisions has
done GoTo the same service as a saboteur.
Mitch Jayne
admin_at_3rdk.com
Received on Wed Mar 14 2001 - 17:42:50 CST
