I have paid for it twice over the years. It is not worth it. Trust us on that. I would recommend a great surplus popunder campaign. I have used these people HERE on Ebay for a few years. What it does is not bring you good sales, but it makes your Alexa ranking increase considerably which in turn helps you out. Well worth the money to use them. And no, I am in no way affiliated with them other than using them at least 20 times with great success. Make sure you have the bandwidth to deliver that many popunders. No worries about spam as they own their own networks.
the link from yahoo in their directory used to be very clear and useful now the link seems to have too much clutter around it to be as useful as it once was
No it is not. Think about it... $300 cold get you a pr7 link for a year. That would most likely be higher then the page your link would be on at yahoo
If you're serious about your website and would like to develop it into proper business, then yahoo directory is for you. On the other hand if you're like most of the people here who make $50 a month from their websites then yahoo is definitely not for you as it's too expensive. That's the reason why google and other search engines like yahoo directory, it's expensive (thus rubbish and one day websites will not be listed there) and payment doesn't guarantee the inclusion (again rubbish sites are not accepted).