One Day Later: Yahoo’s Arbitrage Bomb
Reaction to Yahoo’s decision mixed, but one thing is clear: a lot of people will be affected.
One day following Yahoo (YHOO) dropped a bombshell that it would no longer accept arbitrage traffic to its advertising feed, the reaction has been swift and loud. I’ve been monitoring domain forums and this is what people have to say:
“well…back to working for a living…”
“I’ll need to get back to SAP consulting. I’ve kinda forgotten some of my transaction codes…”
“Quit whining+being lazy and start developing your domains TONIGHT you all… (this goes to myself too.)”
“MSN and google just lost minimum of 15k a month from me and yahoo just lost the revenue on the back of the traffic I was sending through parked.”
“No more xx,xxx$ a month”
“Many people like me were doing arbi for a living making my 15k a month and to say my traffic was trash is just plain silly. A TQ score of a 10 seemed to be ok with yahoo and parked and since parked only allowed traffic from google and MSN then I assume it was good traffic. There is a lot of people this is going to have an impact on and yahoo has no idea how much. My opinion is this is being done as a direct threat on GOOGLE and MSN in a self survival mode.”
“I think it’s going to be BIG losses actually. I’m going to call my broker on Friday morning…time to get that Google stock i always wanted”
Of course, not everyone is upset. A number of people have come out supporting Yahoo’s decision, suggesting that arbitrage traffic isn’t as good as type-in traffic. If you believe that direct navigation traffic converts better than search, then this would be true.
One thing’s for sure. This move will affect many peoples’ lives. I’m a bit shocked by how many people have jumped on the arbitrage bandwagon making $10,000 or more per month. This could also make even more heads roll at Yahoo. If my back-of-the-envelope calculations are right, Yahoo might have to layoff another 1,000 people to make up for the revenue loss.
Personally, I have not done click arbitrage. Still, I’m sure a lot of the affiliate revenue I make from Parked.com is arbitrage. I won’t know for regarding another month how much of that I’ll lose.
What do you think? Was arbitrage good? Bad? Was this a good move by Yahoo?
