Yahoo to Discontinue Paid Inclusion, Search Submit Pro (SSP)

The end of Yahoo’s Paid Inclusion is not surprising, but the timing presents challenges for retailers who relied on the program.  Below is PM Digital’s quick take and initial recommendations.

Last week Yahoo announced that they are discontinuing their Paid Inclusion program (Search Submit Pro) at the end of this year.  The last date Paid Inclusion will be live is December 31, 2009.  The discontinuation of the program will include the top level, category level and product level feeds — basically everything.

Yahoo is leaving the program live through the end of the year so that they don’t leave any retailers in the lurch for the holiday season.  That said, most Yahoo SSP customers are retailers whose fiscal year ends in January – not December.  So Yahoo will in fact be impacting retailers’ full year demand given the loss of revenue for an entire month.

Yahoo says that they are shifting their focus to improving relevancy and the user experience of natural search.  This is the reason they are discontinuing SSP.  I remember that my first phone call on the first day I heard about the Bing/Yahoo deal was to inquire about the SSP program with Yahoo  Those who have been involved in search engine marketing for years may recall that MSN had a similar paid inclusion program that ended in 2002.  When we heard that Yahoo would soon be serving Bing search results, we suspected that the Paid Inclusion program might be discontinued, but at the time of the deal being announced, Yahoo said they did not know the fate of their SSP program.  Basically, though, I am not really all that surprised.

PM Digital has many clients who rely on SSP as a source of demand.  Likewise, we know many retailers have SEO challenges that they have not been able to address for one reason or another, and Yahoo SSP has been contributory in enabling them to yield traffic from Yahoo.

As a certified Yahoo SSP reseller, PM Digital is disappointed. For retailers who rely on demand from SSP, the revenue hit will be jarring.

So what should retailers do?  Shifting 2010 funding from what would have been budgeted for Yahoo SSP to SEO would be the most obvious place to eventually recoup the lost demand.  It would also be beneficial for anyone who relies on revenue from Yahoo SSP to conduct some testing between now and the end of the year to see how much (if any) of the paid inclusion demand shifts to paid search or natural search if SSP is turned off.  This may be one way of quantifying the effect of losing Paid Inclusion from the media mix.

Suzy Sandberg is President of PM Digital.

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