How directories make money, read off their submit forms
A directory is a small business, and the submit form is its checkout. We sorted every directory we track by how it charges, because knowing what a directory is selling is the quickest way to know which of its offers to ignore.
Nobody runs a directory for free for long. Hosting is cheap, but reviewing submissions by hand is slow work, and a directory that takes anything anyone sends turns into a spam list within a month. So every one of them charges something. The question is only what, and the submit form is where they tell you.
We track 842 directories, and every record says whether there is a free lane, whether the link out is followed, and whether the directory wants its badge on your homepage. Sorting by those three fields gives a fairly complete picture of how the business works.
Money is the rarer ask
| How it charges | Directories |
|---|---|
| Has a free lane of some kind | 692 |
| Free lane with a paid fast lane beside it | 374 |
| No free lane at all | 150 |
| Wants its badge on your homepage | 296 |
The rows overlap, since a directory can sell a fast lane and want a badge on the free one. What stands out is the bottom of the table. Far more directories ask for a badge than insist on money, which tells you what most of them are short of. It is links, not cash.
The fast lane is priced against the queue
The most common model is a free queue with a paid way past it. The listing you get is usually the same either way. What you are buying is time.
That changes how to read a slow free queue. The median wait across the directories that publish one is 5 days, and 49 of them take three months or more. Some of that is a small team with a big backlog. Some of it is the product working as designed, because a free queue that cleared in a day would leave nothing to sell. We don't hold that against anyone. It does mean the answer to "should I pay to skip" is almost always "only if the date matters", since waiting costs you nothing except the wait.
The badge is the real currency
296 directories want their badge on your site, and 254 of those give you a followed link back. That is a link exchange with a form in front of it. A new directory has no budget for links and no reason for anyone to mention it, so it asks every maker who wants a listing to link to it first. With enough makers, that adds up to a real backlink profile, which is the whole point.
It is not a bad deal for you, as long as you count. One badge for one followed link from a site with a decent rating is fair. Nine badges in a footer is a lot of your own page spent on other people's links, and several directories rescan to check the badge is still there. We carry a row of them ourselves, and we wrote up what the links behind them actually did for our rating.
Featured slots and ads come last
Once a directory has traffic, it can sell the space above its own list: featured listings, pinned rows, a banner in the sidebar. That money comes from the directory's readers rather than from submitters, which is why a directory that earns this way can afford a free lane that actually moves. We do this too. There are three ad spots on this site, sold to the highest bidder and marked "Ad", and none of them sit inside a ranked list, because an ad dressed as a listing is the thing that makes a directory useless to read.
If you are thinking of building one
A lot of makers who have filled in forty of these forms come away thinking they could run one. The software is the easy part now. DirectoryEasy builds a directory site with paid listings, featured placement and ad slots already wired up, and there are open source templates if you would rather host your own. We have no stake in which you pick.
What no builder hands you is the first hundred listings or anyone to read them, and every model above depends on one of those. The fast lane needs a queue long enough to be worth skipping. The badge needs makers who want the listing badly enough to link back. Ads need readers. The directories we would tell a maker to submit to got one of those going before they started charging for the rest.
What this means when you submit
Read the offer on a form as a price list. A paid lane is a price for speed, not a better listing. A badge is a link exchange, and it is worth doing when the link that comes back is followed and the site giving it has some standing. A directory with nothing to sell but its own queue is one to be patient with or skip.
231 of the directories we track charge no money and want no badge. The best of them are on the free list, the ones that also pass a followed link are free, dofollow and badge-free, and the ones that publish within two days are there if you would rather not pay for speed at all.