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The YAHOO GAME
by Connor Young
If you've been in the online porn game for very long, then you probably understand how important Yahoo can be to the success of an adult porn business. A listing with Yahoo is almost always more valuable than a listing with any other search engine. This is true primarily for three reasons: Yahoo traffic is abundant; Yahoo traffic is consistent; Yahoo traffic converts fairly well. So why doesn't everyone use Yahoo as a primary source of traffic? Well, that's a somewhat complicated issue, and to fully understand Yahoo as it exists today, we first have to look at how it existed in the past.
The online porn business really started to explode in 1997. There were relatively few adult webmasters (by today's standards), and surfers were buying porn right and left. Building thousands of clicks was as easy as filling out a search engine's submission form, and the grandest of all the search engines (well, really it's an index) was Yahoo. Even back then, getting a listing in Yahoo wasn't easy, and many webmasters would give up in frustration after numerous failed attempts. The submission process was free back then, but Yahoo has always been picky about who it accepts in its index. This angers some webmasters, but the fact is that by not accepting just any old adult site, Yahoo manages to keep its index useful to surfers, and to control its growth. If Yahoo simply accepts anyone and everyone, their index would grow so large so quickly that it would generate only an insignificant number of clicks for those websites that are included.
More than a year ago, Yahoo announced to mixed reviews that they were launching a paid "Business Express" submission service. Webmasters could still submit their sites to Yahoo for free, but if they paid a fee of $200 then they would be guaranteed that within a week a Yahoo editor would review their site for possible inclusion. Note that I said possible inclusion, and not guaranteed inclusion. That's right, you could potentially pay your $200 fee only to receive back an email from Yahoo stating that your site was rejected and yes, they would still keep the money in such an event. You paid the $200 fee merely to be considered in a timely manner a free Yahoo submission could take you anywhere from a month to six months to be considered. Since search engine submissions were primarily free at the time when Yahoo launched this paid submission service, many webmasters were furious but Yahoo had wisely retained the free submission process in order to appease the mob, so eventually webmasters calmed down and Business Express was accepted. There were indeed benefits to Business Express a good webmaster could earn back that $200 submission fee in two or three weeks tops, so long as they received a good listing from Yahoo. (How valuable your listing proved to be depended on things like the title of your site and the description Yahoo! editors granted your site more on this later.)
Yes, Business Express had some advantages but it also had some disadvantages, and those came mainly in the form of Yahoo's sometimes unfair execution of the program. See, to qualify for a Business Express listing, websites had to meet certain requirements, which seemed to be spelled out clearly by Yahoo. They would provide webmasters with a list of all requirements prior to any Business Express submissions. Most of these requirements seemed pretty straight forward things like no broken links, and no areas of the site may still be under construction. Yet despite these seemingly obvious rules, Yahoo also included a few "elastic" rules that they could use to discredit just about any site for just about any reason the most commonly used of these rules was that sites must contain significant unique content. A webmaster who had licensed content that was not being used by any other site in the Yahoo category they were submitting to might feel that he or she had met that elastic requirement, only to find that his or her submission was rejected due to inadequate unique content. Say goodbye to a few hundred bucks! A rejected webmaster could appeal the initial decision one time, and sometimes an appeal would result in a listing but Yahoo editors were more than happy to be vague when denying a submission or an appeal. This made the entire process quite frustrating for many adult webmasters. How can you follow the rules when they're not clearly spelled out? (Sounds like obscenity law, but let's not get off topic.)
After the Business Express service proved to be somewhat popular - and its critics were all but silenced due to the passage of time - Yahoo took things a step further and increased the submission price to $600 for adult websites only! Everyone else continued to pay the lower $200 fee (which was recently raised to $300), and that enraged a whole new group of adult webmasters who felt that Yahoo was unfairly targeting the Adult Industry. To make matters worse, Yahoo's free submission service was discontinued, so the only way to even be considered by Yahoo was to cough up $600. Yahoo likely made this decision based on two key factors: adult websites generally make more money than mainstream websites, and raising the fee would diminish the number of submissions Yahoo was receiving. You might think that Yahoo wouldn't want to lower the number of paid submissions, but nothing could be farther from the truth. As stated earlier, too many submissions diminish the value of the Yahoo index. If someone pays $200 to get a listing only to see that listing buried by new submissions within a month's time you get the idea. No matter what Yahoo's reasons were for this obnoxious rate hike, many webmasters were thrown right out of the game meaning that for them, Yahoo could no longer be considered a viable source of new traffic. After all, losing $200 to a vague excuse like "not enough unique content" is one thing, but losing $600 is an entirely different ballgame.
So that's where we stand today. Adult webmasters who want to play the Yahoo game have to be willing to gamble $600 a hand. That's bad news for small webmasters, but there's a silver lining for webmasters who have a budget to spend. With the cost of submission being so high, few new submissions are received and thus existing Yahoo listings hold their value better than before. But is a Yahoo listing worth $600? Unfortunately there's no easy answer to that question either.
Adult sites don't make money like they used to. We all know that. Where a thousand uniques might have earned you $100 to $200 a day back in 1997, you'd be lucky to make $20 a day now. A reasonably good Yahoo listing will net you several thousand uniques for the first few weeks while the listing is new (although the new traffic converts poorly because it's mainly made up of Yahoo regulars looking for free porn). Once the listing drops off the "new" status, you could get anywhere from fifty to a thousand hits per day. Obviously that's a huge scale, and what you end up pulling in will depend on factors such as your domain name, the title of your site, the description of your site (which Yahoo editors can change to suit them) and the category in which you're placed. You can suggest a description for your site, but Yahoo editors often change your suggested description in ways you won't like. Usually they will go with whatever title you have given your site (so long as it matches the title shown at the actual site), and of course your domain name is your domain name nothing the editors can do about that.
So let's say for the sake of argument that you get a relatively good listing that nets you 1000 uniques a day for three months before it starts to lose steam. Now let's argue that with those 1000 hits you make an average of $20 a day in sales, be that sponsorship sales or AVS sales or membership sales or whatever. At that rate, you would make back your Yahoo submission fee in about a month. Sounds like a good deal, right? But wait, you have to factor in the risk that you might be rejected and lose your $600 submission fee. Let's say you submit three sites to Yahoo and two are accepted and one is rejected. Now you spend $1800 for 2000 uniques per day. After the first month now you have made $1200, and are still in the hole by $600. It still seems like a good deal at this point though making back your investment in a month and a half isn't bad.
Now, before you rush off to Yahoo, let's consider yet another scenario. Let's say you submit four sites and two are rejected (a very real possibility) and two are accepted. Of the two that are accepted, let's say you manage 200 uniques a day off of one of them, and 800 uniques a day off the other one. You now paid $2400 for 1000 uniques per day. Let's now say you manage only $15 per day average in sales, which also is very possible. It would now take you almost half a year to get your money back! Ouch! And to make matters worse, your Yahoo listing will grow less and less valuable with time as new sites push it back in the search results. Your 800 uniques will eventually turn to 700, then to 600, then to 500 see the problem?
So playing the Yahoo game is certainly a gamble. If you do decide to go that route, here are a few things to consider. Spend some time scouting Yahoo and seeing what sites get listed. This will give you an idea as to how much content your site must have to be considered. Build sites especially for Yahoo. Register a domain name with keywords in the name itself, and spend a lot of time thinking of a title and description that will help out your ranking. Yahoo lists sites within categories alphabetically, but if you try to submit a site with the title "!007 Sex Girls" then you're going to increase the chances of turning off an editor and losing your submission fee. They might list a site with that title but more likely they would reject it, or change the title to something you don't want, like simply "Sex Girls," which would bury you and make your listing all but worthless. It all depends on the editor who reviews your submission. For any site that you submit to Yahoo, don't skimp on the content! Make sure to include plenty of fresh pictures that editors likely have not yet seen. Don't include content where you link to a different domain name such as live shows if the surfer leaves your domain name then the editor will not consider that content to be part of your site. Additionally, leased content such as live shows run the risk of being rejected as "not unique enough" since the same content can probably be seen on a number of sites already in the Yahoo listing. Make sure there are no broken links on your site, that all areas of your site have been completed, and that you stay away from anything tricky like pop-up consoles or excessive JavaScript tricks. Don't litter your pages with advertisements either you can always add banners later if you want, but make your pages as clear and straightforward as possible before you submit them to Yahoo.
Well, that's the Yahoo game. High rollers only need apply, and if you're a rookie then be prepared for some fist-pounding anger before you achieve any positive results. Yahoo can be your best friend or the company you most love to hate, but the traffic potential from a Yahoo listing is undeniable. Let's just hope they don't raise the fee again anytime soon.
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