The End Of An Era
In October last year, Yahoo announced their decision to phase out their Search Submit Pro product (YSSP) informing all it’s customers that they would shut down on 1st January 2010, with the last day of serving being the 31st December. This brought to a close that had been around for about 9 years under many guises including Inktomi and Paid Inclusion (PI). And one that I have been heavily involved in for the past 6 years!
I made my feelings known on this soon after the announcement and have spent the last couple of months trying to get the most out of this product for my clients, which is hard to do when Yahoo haven’t really been able to give us any decent support since they made the people there redundant!
Although the service officially stopped on the 31st, it’s taken them a while to get round to switching off the databases that were used to store the listings and so there has been some traffic coming into clients’ sites this week. Through our reporting tool, we have seen our clients traffic whittle away over the week until there were just 3 clients still getting a small trickle of clicks through to their site this morning.
I’d expect this to stop entirely over the weekend so that on Monday YSSP will be no more. I think it was a great product that worked really well for our clients. It drove relatively cheap traffic to their site and allowed them to get the right marketing message across to the user, and could make their listings stand out as well. But the merger of Micro$oft and Yahoo effectively banged the nails into the coffin for it, and as part of the agreement YSSP had to stop.
Whether or not we see it under another name once the merger has finally been completed remains to be seen, but for now Paid Inclusion is officially over.
Where that leaves me in terms of employment is still unsure. The loss of this revenue stream reduces our profit and I think, means the company no longer makes a profit. We have been looking at bringing in new business but what company in their right mind decides to move from an existing supplier to another in the two months before Christmas?