On July 28, the announcement trickled out that AltaVista has ended the paid placement program. The article below was the original article when the paid placement program was announced.
Internet users can have strange quirks.
There are those who will purposely not follow a link if it looks like paid advertising, just on the principle of it. Studies have shown that banner advertising placed on relevant search returns have a much lower click through rate than the actual search returns. Remember too that on AltaVista, it's only the top 2 returns that are available for paid placement. The bottom line is, if your keywords fit the descriptions above, you should be checking out your options for securing top placement for these keywords. If you're interested, contact us and we can help you work through the process.