Re: Yahoo "fresh" listings

From: Marco Janeczek <info_at_webadvertising.ca>
Date: Tue 12 Feb 2002 16:04:11 -0600

>Yahoo is still one of my fav sites

Alot of people say that. But actually
When I tried to search for something, their
search brings up very complicated results.

Especially YAHOO.ca (directories, etc...maybe I'm not
used to it, anyhow)

The fee their charging is a fee with corporation of
LookSmart, I think. Most portals are doing this. They
are abandoning the DMOZ area. Why? well DMOZ has been
offline for some quite time. I mean they are probably
busy with millions of updates. That is my guess...
Since they're FREE.

Therefore they are not only building a "yellow pages"
of their own, but also charge for it. The
question is that it is hard to see your results.

I have submitted one of my clients website
through YAHOO.ca, and the website is there, but
I think that only Crawlers or myself will be able
to find it. Not an average person. Too many directories
to crawl through. People will NOT go through the entire
directory to search for your listing. They will click on
the first few and find the most suitable etailer or
service that they need.

That is why they have revamped their model and also
added Overture listings. BUT the problem with their
Overture listings (here I am mentioning Canada), that
they are U.S. based only. So actually advertisers are
not targeting who they want. Here I mean advertisers
shipping to U.S. only

Therefore Google has a better approach with choosing
which country to target. Also I'm not sure (not that
techie) how it works, and if it really is targeting
by country. They are also currently expanding into
B2B (joined Earthlink) to provided AdWords.

By the way, Yahoo seems a very reasonable site but
for <56K connection. Why? In my opinion they have a
very basic designs. I'm not arguing here, because
most people still use <56k. But personally the
design of Yahoo does not seem to be that "interactive"
and attractive. Although the audience is there.

HotJobs was also like this. Their design was not
that well made. Recently they made a few changes,
and their design seems to be much better, if you know
what I mean. Revamped. I guess they wanted to compete
more with Monster.

Broadband is not there yet to provide high quality
websites. Still load time is the issue. Compression of
files maybe should be looked at. Well designed
(in my opinion) is News.com. But I'm not sure how it
behaves on <56k. I use cable now :)

I guess the argument would also be who you are
targeting. I do not want to offend anybody, but maybe
demographically and by age, the content/design of the
site also varies. Maybe the creative banner design
should also vary ? Anyone any stats on this demographics ?

My father usually goes to yahoo.ca to find things. I'm not
sure if it is because he is used to it or because of the
design. He never uses MSN.ca even if it is his homepage!!!
Interesting eh ?!

> Logo in HTML code

I guess embedding the Logo/Design in HTML code would be
harder to maintain. But it would be interesting to know of
any statistics on this.


My 2 cents :)


Marco Janeczek
WebAdvertising.ca




Received on Tue Feb 12 2002 - 16:04:11 CST