I remember trying to get one of my company's sites listed on Yahoo! back in the late 1990s. Despite us being an established company (founded in 1985) with a good domain name (cardgames.com) and a bunch of good, free content (rules for various card games, links to various places to play those games online, etc.), it took months.
That was not a bad thing. It was curated. Most of the crap never made it in the directory precisely because humans made decisions about what got in. If you wanted in the directory faster, you could pay a fee to get to the front of the queue. The result is that Yahoo could hire people to process the queue and make money without ads.
