Yahoo to implement "quality-based pricing".

 I just received the letter below from parked.com (note that it will apply to all parked domains that use Yahoo, including SEDO et al). It seems to indicate that Yahoo will soon be giving domainers less $ for "parked pages" (as these will probably be seen as low-quality sties), whereas blogs with real content will be seen as high-quality sites, and will thus earn more $.  This could be really interesting if Google follows suit (as it normally does). 

Last night Yahoo, our primary search provider, announced to all of their advertisers and partners that they would be implementing a "quality based pricing" system starting immediately in the United States and Canada.

 "…quality-based pricing is designed to adjust advertiser pricing based on the quality of traffic coming from our distribution network. Traffic is intended to be priced in a manner that is consistent with the quality delivered to advertisers, based on conversion rates and other proprietary factors.

To assist you in better understanding the level of your traffic quality, we plan to provide you with a Traffic Quality (TQ) score for each of your implementations. TQ scores should be included in your partner reports and communicated as a number from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest rating.

 

By pricing traffic commensurate with quality, we believe that we will deliver higher value to our advertisers, thus strengthening our marketplace and driving up monetization for our partners."

This is how the "quality based pricing" system will work at Parked.com. A person comes to one of your domains parked with us, they search and click out to an advertiser, Yahoo will look to see what your traffic quality score is and let's say you are an 8. The advertiser will be charged whatever an 8 is worth, if the click was originally $1.00, I was told that the click would be at least $0.80 but it could be much higher.

We will provide you with your traffic quality score once we receive it today, the TQ scores are supposed to be updated every 2 weeks. Over the next few weeks as we learn how the TQ scores are calculated we should be able to provide a little better guidance on how to increase your scores. If you feel that your score is too low, we should be able to work with you to see how we can improve your score.

Over the next 10 days Yahoo will continue to make improvements to the new system.  We do not have any news on when any other countries will be added to the quality based pricing system.  One last thing is that this will affect all parking companies that are using Yahoo, not just Parked.com.