Yahoo! Modifies Trademark Keyword Policy

[DaddyHalbucks]

Yahoo! Modifies Trademark Keyword Policy

Yahoo! Search Marketing has begun notifying U.S. advertisers that they will no longer be allowed to bid on competitors' trademarked keywords beginning next week.

http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3587316

 

[austinandrew]

I think this is a big mistake. Yahoo already makes it much harder to place ads than Google, and it's infrastructure is making it harder for YPN to compete with Adsense (e.g. different accounts for each country and for local search). They keep shooting themselves in the foot.

 

[denny007]

Yea, advertise on Yahoo (Overture) is much more complicated than on adwords. But Google also do not allow bid on TMs (I think the TM holder has to complain to them first). From my experience, the competitors name bids does not convert well anyway, people looking for info about their products, datasheets etc...

 

[austinandrew]

Yea, advertise on Yahoo (Overture) is much more complicated than on adwords. But Google also do not allow bid on TMs (I think the TM holder has to complain to them first). From my experience, the competitors name bids does not convert well anyway, people looking for info about their products, datasheets etc...

Google let's you bid on TMs, you just can't include the trademarked name in your ad text.

 

[NameYourself]

...they may not sell or promote competitors' products or services....

This will have a huge impace on sites like Shopping.com, BizRate, etc... You can't sell anything that competes with that trademark on your site either. So say goodbye to comparison shopping on yahoo! How in the world do they think that makes for better search results to the user? I guess they want to ensure that they never become as successful as google :wink:

 

[denny007]

Google let's you bid on TMs

If the TM holder made complain to Google, the word will be inactivated, I do not remember what company names I have bid on, about 4 or 5 keywords has been inactivated because of TM.

 

[Fearless]

Google let's you bid on TMs

If the TM holder made complain to Google, the word will be inactivated, I do not remember what company names I have bid on, about 4 or 5 keywords has been inactivated because of TM.

There are ads for the term "Geico" on Google. I'm sure Geico complained.

 

[DNGeeks]

Overture advertising sucks. Their signup process is terrible, their system is horrible and the company doesn't offer any help.

I tried using their system. Since I'm an "international" customer I had to verify the card by phone but the number I was provided didn't work from outside the US. Then my bids were swallowed due to some error on their side which they never apologized for. My ads were constantly rejected even though the final ad was the same as all the others. Verification of my site being available took a week because they said my site was down, even though it wasn't.

I burnt my $ and won't go back to using them.

 

[NameYourself]

I've also had ad campaigns running on Yahoo! for years, then suddenly without warning I would find that my ads were suddenly disapproved for no good reason. My use of them is now minimal.

 

[NameYourself]

Google also has it share of ad disapproval troubles too. Anyone selling affiliate products through google may have received notices that google received complaints about the product and doesn't allow you to advertise it anymore.. of course other ads still run for the same product.

 

[Yojimbo]

I've had problems with both companies. Overture stopped running some of my ads because I was bidding on a competitors product name. The funny thing was that other people I knew personally were doing the same thing and continued to do so long after my ads were de-approved.

Once Google kept rejecting the ad I was submitting so finally I took the exact language from someone elses ad that was running (so obviously it had been approved) for a different product - substituted my product name in for theirs - submitted it - and, of course, got rejected. It's weird. Both comapnies systems seem to be Ad Hoc most of the time and there is no consistancy.