I received this an email from Yahoo a few hours ago announcing a new “quality” based pricing that they will be introducing as of today. Here’s how quality pricing works according to the email:

“Quality-based pricing will give us the ability to price traffic commensurate with the value that advertisers receive from each traffic source. We recognize that this approach may have an impact on how you operate your business, and as a valued Yahoo! publisher we wanted to let you know about this new feature, as you may notice fluctuations in your Yahoo! Publisher Network earnings.”

I am already not a fan of this. I’ve been on both sides of marketing for a long time now and from my experience it has always been the advertisers responsibility to spend their advertising dollars wisely. With this new system Yahoo will basically be guaranteeing advertisers their money’s worth while publishers are tossed around in the wind. I could have a highly professional site that I put a lot of time and money into and be using Yahoo instead of direct advertising. Well, even if my site is totally legit and NOT MFA (or in this case MFY), if the advertiser doesn’t convert on their choice of advertising keywords that put their ad on my site in the first place then they will get their money back and I will be left with nothing. Yahoo sees this differently, however:

“Quality-based pricing reinforces our overall commitment to deliver long-term success for our distribution partners, a high-quality experience for users and high-value traffic to our advertisers. We are excited about this initiative, and plan to work closely with you as we roll out these features across our network.”

I think I see a vague reference to publishers in there (users), but, this change seems to be in favor of putting publishers on the back burner. This is another reason I am glad I switched back to AdSense. With AdSense the risk is shared equally between the advertisers and publishers. As an advertiser I have to test different keywords and find out what converts the best for my product or service. As a publisher I have to see if AdSense pays more than Commission Junction, Azoogle, Yahoo, etc. Now that Yahoo is tipping the scale in favor of their advertisers I think this could in turn cause less publishers to use Yahoo, which also in turn could lead to less results for their advertisers. I doubt the new system will work.