From the Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2005: The Wall Street Journal had a nice article about the sold out advertising on Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL home pages. Claiming to consistently be sold out for many months in advance too. But the real bang of the article was the cost of those large ads: AOL says prices for some ad units have increased as much as 20 percent since January 2005. MSN says it charges between several hundred thousand dollars and $1 million for a prime, 24-hour ad spot on its home page.
LeavingTheGrid
2005-12-14 05:59:57 UTC
In a nutshell: Yahoo prices the pay-per-click ads according to the number of hits a search term receives.
If you've got a really popular search phrase, like "lasik surgery," you're going to pay more per click.
However, if your phrase was "Lasik surgery for dogs," you'll pay much less because it's submitted less frequently.
What you do with Yahoo is establish how much you're willing to spend per day.
Let's say you decide you can spend $50 a day. Let's say your search term is "lasik surgery" and the price Yahoo designates for that phrase is $1 per click. As soon as 50 people click on your ad, it disappears for the day.
Then the next day, it starts all over.
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This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.