A good practical case in point is a column I wrote for Business 2.0 about Yahoo's paid submission service for businesses , which, at the time, was voluntary. The anecdotal experience I had led me to believe this was a revenue-generating tactic for Yahoo, and a bad idea. I started out with the notion that Yahoo should simply do a better job of providing tools for submission and monitoring status of submissions, rather than charge for commercial submissions. After researching posts to message boards by people using this service, talking to a few experts, and interviewing Yahoo's editor in chief, I came away with the opposite impression. My premise was that Yahoo wasn't serving its customers.
Marketers are accidental customers.
By charging a reasonable fee to assure feedback, Yahoo was essentially legitimizing the marketers and giving them a voice and a name in dealing with getting their site in the directory. Maybe this is just an object lesson in keeping flexible and changing one's mind. In the interim, Yahoo has changed its policies in a variety of ways, but all these decisions appear to me to benefit its audience, and to ensure that marketers submitting sites meet a bar of intent and seriousness. Or perhaps they're each other's evil twins.