Hi, I was wondering if DMOZ had any plans to charge for a Listing like Yahoo does? That way they could hire more "Volunteers" and more of us could be listed there.
As I understand it, volunteers are just that, volunteers. They do not get paid, therefore they do not get hired, they volunteer and do the work for free. So charging people to list their sites, so they can hire more volunteers is in some ways an oxymoron. (Self contradicting statement) Whether they intend to charge a fee for some other reason the future, I do not know, but I strongly doubt it. Cheers James
Editors are volunteers and recieve no payment. If the directory was to start charging for reviews and listings, most editors would be unwilling to edit there anymore. It should be remembered that ODP is NOT a listing service, it is a number of like minded volunteer editors categorising sites that are on the internet. What webmasters percieve and expect, is generally not what we are really about
You can pay to get into many directories, why would we want to change to join something where there are plenty already. But to have hundreds of editors as passionate volunteers who want to list sites only for end users, that is unusual and probably why we get used as Google directory.
You can flip this argument backwards. Some editors accept money for listing sites. This is supposed to be prohibited by DMOZ rules. But nothing is done about it, anyway. Making DMOZ accept money for reviewing sites (like Yahoo does) would make thing fairer for not-corrupted editors, webmasters and final users.
DMOZ doesn't charge for listing but "volunteers" do. The going rate is about $100, awhile back price was down to $40-$50 but thanks to efforts of many editors in different forums such as this, the price has gone up to $100 level again.