Hits Yahoo Search Partners — Variable Pricing

Domain name parking programs using Yahoo feeds will see revenue linked to quality.

Much like Google does with variable pricing for its Adsense publishers, Yahoo is now paying a variable price per click on content site clicks. Yahoo will judge the value of a click on your site and pay you accordingly for that click.

This change is being pushed out to domain parking services that use Yahoo’s feed as well. In a message to its clients today, Parked CTO Donny Simonton wrote:

This is how the “quality based pricing” system will work at Parked.com. A person comes to one of your domains parked with us, they search and click out to an advertiser, Yahoo will look to see what your traffic quality score is and let’s say you are an 8. The advertiser will be charged whatever an 8 is worth, if the click was originally $1.00, I was told that the click would be at least $0.80 but it could be much higher.

We will provide you with your traffic quality score once we receive it today, the TQ scores are supposed to be updated every 2 weeks. Over the next few weeks as we learn how the TQ scores are calculated we ought to be able to provide a little better guidance on how to increase your scores. If you feel that your score is too low, we ought to be able to work with you to see how we can improve your score.

Over the next 10 days Yahoo will continue to make improvements to the fresh system. We do not have any news on when any other countries will be added to the quality based pricing system. One last thing is that this will affect all parking firms that are using Yahoo, not just Parked.com.

This news is interesting for two reasons.

1. Advertisers may warm up to Yahoo’s content network if they are charged for clicks as stated by their value. More advertisers may mean more revenue for publishers.

2. We’ll start to see how valuable parking page clicks really are.