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This is not good. This won't stand for long. Reminds me of Yahoo advertising based on the buyer's ignorance. Quote: I didn't realize the answer till later, af
by taigeair 13y ago
This is not good. This won't stand for long. Reminds me of Yahoo advertising based on the buyer's ignorance.
Quote:
I didn't realize the answer till later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It was neither of my guesses. The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less.
Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads. Advertisers were willing to pay ridiculous amounts for banner ads. So Yahoo's sales force had evolved to exploit this source of revenue. Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
The prices seemed cheap compared to print, which was what advertisers, for lack of any other reference, compared them to. But they were expensive compared to what they were worth. So these big, dumb companies were a dangerous source of revenue to depend on. But there was another source even more dangerous: other Internet startups.
http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html http://paulgraham.com/yahoo.html