Google monetizes at like $50-$60 rpm. I’m sure the search engines people are building with BOSS can do $10. That’s an insane margin. Random blogs get <$1 cpm from Adsense for Content, but no one should be using BOSS to power a blog.

- It is clearly stated in the TOS that you are allowed to cache as long as you maintain control of the cache.
- It clearly states in the TOS from day one that Yahoo reserves the right to charge fees and/or require you to take ads. People, don’t you read? Bait and switch? Maybe if you had the foresight of dog.
- You can go get ads from anywhere. I’m sure if they required you to take their ads you would complain about how restricted it is. Search ads do in the $10-$50 rpm range. Everyone knows Yahoo ads don’t perform as well as Google, so now you are not tied to them. Pay the reasonable fee and go make a killing.

a) Did anyone really think this service can be for free?
b) If yahoo forced you to use their ads, on the same forum people will crib out how they dont want to use yahoo’s ads. And why should yahoo pay for your site not being able to monetize well?

c) I am surprised no one is talking about caching the search results. I don’t see yahoo not allowing caching in TOS. so if your site generates more than 10k queries, there are bound to be lot of duplicate queries, just have a caching scheme.

These are fair prices with plenty of room to make $. Search is the best monetization engine in the history of software – Google makes a $50 cpm. I think you can pay a $0.30 cpm and go get Adsense for Search.

Bob at least understands how pricing works. It based on value to the customer. Developers pay for AWS. Will could they raise prices? Sure, but people would build things in-house or go elsewhere. There’s incentive for AMZN to do so – and in this case YHOO.

If you think BOSS is expensive try going out and crawling, scoring, deduping, ranking, de-spaming, etc 50B websites yourself.

As for the Bait and Switch thing everyone here is harping on, the last I checked Yahoo is 1) not retail 2) not using sales techniques to steer customers away from low-profit items. You ‘customers’ are using this product for FREE to make money for YOURSELVES.

Like I said in my original comment, take another look at the chart on top. It clearly shows the pricing model is based on the number of queries and query type — not the number of results returned. Units are 10 cents each AND every developer gets 30 units PER DAY for free. FREE. Based on that chart, if your site is making 10k API calls a day it is a pretty high volume site. Read: You are profiting. Period.

All of you guys need to do the math before crying out for a revolution.
Ridiculous.

Yahoo don’t know my margins, so how will they know how far to squeeze me? Anyway they can’t charge me more than anyone else, since I can always just sign up as a new user. That’s the point of open pricing.

Yahoo will charge based on what the *market* can bear, not my particular company. If I have a business that makes a large profit based on that, I’m home dry.

This bait-and-switch stuff is nonsense. Yahoo was always clear that they would eventually charge for this. Anyone who built a service/business on BOSS while ignoring that fact was foolish.

Bob

omg.yahoo dot com

In retail sales, a bait and switch is a form of fraud in which the party putting forth the fraud lures in customers by advertising a product or service at an unprofitably low price, then reveals to potential customers that the advertised good is not available but that a substitute is.
The goal of the bait-and-switch is to convince some buyers to purchase the substitute good as a means of avoiding disappointment over not getting the bait, or as a way to recover sunk costs expended to try to obtain the bait.

Other advertising practices, such as the use of sales techniques to steer customers away from low-profit items, depend on many of the same psychological mechanisms as a bait and switch.

Some employers use bait-and-switch tactics in advertising job openings, by giving false or misleading descriptions of working conditions or compensation packages.

Mona, why are you defending such scummy practices? THIS IS A CLASSIC BAIT AND SWITCH. THIS IS A SCUMMY DIRTY TACTIC. IT IS WRONG.

This is a bait and switch.

Compare this to how Google handled it. They have been offering Google Apps for free. When people initially signed up, they could have 100 email accounts or more for free. Later, Google decided to change the model so that more people would pay for the service.

BUT GOOGLE DID NOT RETROACTIVELY CHARGE THE PEOPLE WHO HAD SIGNED UP UNDER THE OLD PROPOSAL.

Instead they changed it so that any new people signing up would be subject to the new pricing.

This is the right way to do it.

Yahoo’s developers have a right to feel pissed off, and Yahoo needs to do the right thing here.

Bil

Are you blind?

Don’t you see that just when you think you will be making a profit and after you have developed all of your services and made yourself developent on Yahoo, they will then raise prices even more and squeeze your ass?

Don’t you see that this is what the developers are up in arms about?

It is called bait and switch. The oldest scam in the book. You are just too blind to see it.

There is a sucker born every minute. When you don’t know who the sucker is, it is probably you.
Monica