Yahoo Sponsored Search Opens to Direct Linking
Filed Under Affiliate Marketing, Commission Junction, Yahoo, Yahoo Search Marketing
Yahoo Search Marketing has just announced that after 6 months of internal deliberation on the subject, they are opening up their advertising platform to allow direct linking by affiliates and other advertising partners.
Up until this announcement, it was Yahoo’s policy that you couldn’t send sponsored traffic to a site that you did not own, even if you had a working affiliate agreement with the merchant to do so. This policy has not always been implemented across the board; I have been able to get direct link ads up in YSM for years, but this policy would often rear its ugly head at the worst times, after all the work was done. Yahoo has shut down entire accounts of mine in the past in an effort to enforce this ill-advised policy. I am happy to announce they have come to their senses.
This represents a significant shift and CJ is bragging that they had a lot to do with this policy change. What role CJ has played is not clear, but they announce it as follows:
After more than six months in the making and much customer feedback and testing, we are pleased to announce that Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) has recently updated its editorial policies and will now allow U.S. publishers to direct link to their advertisers. In the past, YSM’s editorial policy prevented publishers from linking directly to their advertiser partners and required that traffic be sent first to the publisher’s Web site. The new policy eliminates this restriction and opens a much broader search marketing opportunity for publishers.Â
This YSM policy change is the result of a strong relationship between Commission Junction and YSM. We have spent more than six months working with YSM to enact the new editorial policy and are very pleased that this effort has resulted in changes that are sure to create opportunities for our publishers and advertisers.
CJ will no doubt win big points for helping to make this happen. There are many affiliates who spend precious time building out landing pages or redirect systems to get around the old policy. This will certainly affect the way many PPC affiliates do business.
I never understood their old policy and how Yahoo could justify leaving so much money on the table. Only in a huge corporation could fear of legal actions, cause such an irrational policy.
Yahoo is now poised to woo Google-weary affiliates after numerous “quality guidelines” slaps against affiliates in the Adwords format. Many recent studies have shown the Google slaps have been a boon for small PPC marketing platforms, which have absorbed many affiliates looking to recoup lost traffic. Yahoo can now attract these advertisers with a more permissive policy than Google. Hopefully this will give them a competitive advantage, and show Google that they “slap” affiliates at their peril. 
