Hey how did you get the deep link into Yahoo for FREE?? I would like to know this as this would boost my site a lot.
Categories with active editors can be very helpful since they might contain some forgotten websites but busy editors tend to draw suspicion from some senior staff members that seem to have nothing better to do then investigate other editors. Submitted and forgot about it, no idea how long it took to appear, it was probably helped by being content website submitted to non-commercial category.
You have to be a fool to pay for a listing, and more of a fool to pay for it to be delisted. It is one backlink, the same effort in a different marketing direction will yield much better results, virtually no site gets any worthwhile direct hits as a result of a listing, and you can counter the use of a DMOZ description as a snippet. If you have cash in your pocket you won't miss then send it to the organisation in my signature where it will do something worthwhile - spending it that way will have exactly the same effect on your web marketing as spending it bribing an editor to get you listed, i.e. none, but it will make you feel better.
So you are saying that any listing in DMOZ paid or not, really does not mean anything? Why list then?
It used to carry a lot more weight in the past. When it was better maintained, more up to date, editors religiously reviewed submission queues, and it gave you a Google advantage with categories appearing in search results and a little PR boost on top, and of course the Google Directory clone was prominent on their site so a lot more people accessed the data that way. For some topics the DMOZ category is still miles ahead of anything anyone else has done and is still maintained to an exceptionally high standard. It is a shame that they have effectively been demoted by increasing irrelevance of the rest of the Directory on the Internet.