I was thinking about things that I dislike about Yahoo!’s new platform, its definitely a huge improvement, but from the business end, YSM seems to approach advertising much differently than Google. To mix metaphors, if the proof of the pudding is in the eating, its easy to understand why Google is eating Yahoo’s lunch.

1. Higher minimum CPC. How can Yahoo! possibly justify a min. bid of $.10 when Google allows a min. bid of $.01. In my experience, its clearly posturing as the lowest CPC we have ever seen is $.02, but the fact that Yahoo! has an artificial restriction is maddening.
2. Human Editors. Notice to Yahoo!, you could hire the entire editorial team of the WSJ, New York Times and Boston Globe, and you wouldn’t have enough editorial brainpower to handle search. Search is a numbers game. Stop putting humans in the way. If your numbers say that people are responding to an ad, let it run. Don’t give that power to a human editor.
3. Not being Agency Friendly. We manage close to 100 campaigns per month for our entertainment clients. In order to create an account under our Agency management account, we have to email Yahoo, which creates shell accounts, named “Shell Account 1″, “Shell Account 2″. When we use those accounts, we have to email them and ask them to change the name to whatever we want. This is the most basic of a 100 ways that Yahoo! makes it tough to run many, large SEM campaigns with them.
4. Contextual Network. Its small and not well-optimized. In my opinion, too much emphasis on highest-bid and not enough emphasis on what ads are generating clicks on against that content. Since its a CPC network, poor optimization leads to less revenue, which leads to less publishers.
5. API. The API and the web site do not have the same functions. One example, through the management interface, I can run a report that shows me what URLs the clicks went to. There is no API function for that report.
6. Constantly Behind the Game. It still takes forever for humans to approve ads, despite their promise of faster ad approvals. And, even worse, we are constantly having words/ads declined for campaigns that ended months ago! Yahoo, take those people reviewing old ads, and put them on the new ones.
7. Difficult Human Editors. We’ve actually had the term “High School Musical” declined for a campaign for the High School Musical soundtrack. This 1 term took 3 revisions, and three calls with Yahoo’s human editors. Some of their editors are great, reasonable and smart - there are some that are just difficult.
8. Prepay billing even with a credit card. The concept of a declining balance is lame for a company as large as Yahoo. You have an authorization with Visa, Mastercard, Amex to charge the card. Why do you need to insist on holding money, and to make matters worse, insisting that we put in a minimum of 3 days worth of money into the system?
9. API again. Our Chief Architect says ‘You have to generate the Java classes to talk to the API. Google does this for you.”. Whatever that means.
10. My biggest pet peeve is: No display ads. Google lets you run text ads, video ads and banner ads on a CPC-basis with no minimum spend. Yahoo, the clear 2nd place company, doesn’t allow banner or video ads. If you want to use those, according to one of their reps, its a min. of $50,000! Google made its billions $.10 and $.15 at a time. Yahoo is trying to make up that ground $50,000 at a time. Sometimes, you have to follow the leader and in this case, I would beg Yahoo to realize that creative is only a hook to get a click. Do everything in your power to get a click! If that means better creative, allow it.

Thoughts?