Affiliate Marketing

I was reading my morning email when I came across an email from my Yahoo Search Marketing account based in the UK. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, Yahoo has insisted on charging this account in GBP, that is Great British Pounds or £. It takes some getting used to, especially when a £0.10 bid is in all reality a $0.19. This is further complicated by the fact that most affiliate networks pay you in the currency of your registered country, that is, in USD. But I didn’t start this post to tell you about how Yahoo insists on charging in pounds for UK clicks, to their enrichment, while MSN and Google simply charge in United States Dollars. I started this post to tell you about a different announcement.

I got an announcement from Yahoo UK, not that they would start charging American clients in dollars, but that they would be lowering the minimum bid for “certain keywords”. Here is what they say:

 

The Minimum Bid for each click vary by search term and starts from £0.05. Please note that as the minimum bid depends on the specific search term, certain keywords will have a variable minimum bid of £0.05 and others a variable minimum bid of £0.10. The strange part is they are lowering the minimum bid on a keyword by keyword basis. I suppose that is just like Yahoo, because they are known for making nonsensical policies that makes everyone think they are in fact “yahoo”. This is not exactly the improvement I was looking for, but it is an improvement. Let’s hope they lower the minimum bid requirements in the US market as well. Now that would be really interesting. But don’t expect that to happen any time soon, because let’s face it, £0.05 is in reality the equivalent of $0.10. They are simply bringing their UK minimum into line with the US minimum.