Yahoo-Bing Transition for Lower Earnings — Local.com Blames

First echos felt of rough transition from Yahoo to Microsoft for pay-per-click listings.

Local.com has warned that its fourth quarter revenue will come in below expectations thanks to the transition of Yahoo pay-per-click to Microsoft.

People who park domain names with Yahoo partners are reporting some fluctuations in revenue since the transition a couple months ago, which is part of a partnership. In an email to clients yesterday, WhyPark noted that its parent firm Yahoo had to completely revamp its keyword system in order to optimize for Microsoft.

Bing handles keywords differently than Yahoo used to. At Yahoo, for example, “world map,” “world maps,” “a world map,” and other variations were all essentially the same term with the same set of advertisers. In Bing land, those are different terms with different advertisers, and some versions of that term may pay better than others.

Our parent firm, Parked.com worked tirelessly to figure out how things work at Bing to yield the highest revenue.

I’ve also heard from domainers that lower quality traffic is performing much worse on Bing than it was with Yahoo. Clients with higher quality traffic haven’t been penalized as much.