Brian, I agree!

We are one of those small businesses they are hurting. I couldn't agree with your comments and objections more.

I immediately replied to the notice from GoTo.com with a letter to their Vice President who sent the original message. Of course, when their Customer Service department responded, it was straight corporate double-speak that did not address, nor even acknowledge, the points I made or the questions I asked directly. When I replied to their reply and restated my points and re-asked my questions, they again responded with a boiler plate. I may as well have been talking to the wall.

They point out that they haven't raised prices in the three years they have been in business. I replied that that was irrelevant, since a MINIMUM is NOT a price increase, but simply a barrier which keeps the smaller guys out of the game. Besides, how can they increase their prices when their customer is the one who sets the price by out-bidding other customers? What they did was a blatant manipulation of their business process to squeeze more money out of their smallest customers.

Hi Brian,

At present I split my (very limited) advertising budget between GoTo for promoting my Web Site and for buying subscribers to my ezine, with an even smaller amount spent on ezine advertising.

I feel that over the coming months many users will stop bidding for infrequently used search terms altogether, and, with a $0.05 minimum bid, even the popular terms will become too expensive for the average bidder. At present, with many popular terms, even where the top bids are over $0.50, I can get a listing in the lower half of the first page (numbers 11 to 20) for 2 or 3 cents. With the new pricing structure I will need to bid well over the 5c minimum to get a similar listing, making the cost per visitor too expensive.

I am therefore looking at my whole advertising strategy and will probably spend more on advertising and on buying subscribers to my ezine, rather than spend it on GoTo.

I believe that in the short term GoTo will prove to be the loser as thousands of customers will stop using their services and may well also remove GoTo search boxes from their sites.

Best wishes,

Hi Brian,

GoTo will fall on its own sword here. You'd think they'd learn by looking around at the failure of all of the high ad rate sites, but this is just more dot.com arrogance. With all their new placement agreements, they are trying to flex some muscle. It won't work. As you stated, return on investment rates don't change to accommodate GoTo. Anyone looking for alternatives might try these other search engine programs, all of which I have used successfully. There are more, like Sprinks, Jeeves, BrainFox, etc. but I haven't used them.

FindWhat
http://www.findwhat.com/

Kanoodle
http://www.kanoodle.com/

7Search
http://www.7search.com/

Bay9
http://www.Bay9.com/

Thanks,