But not because of the increase. That hurts. But marketers’ gripe is the company set a deadline of midnight on Feb. 6, but actually upped the prices sooner.

Marc Saxe, owner of Web site timeshare company Resort Opportunities in Palm Desert, CA, said he received an e-mail forwarded to him from a bid-management company at 7 PM saying the 10-cent charge would go into effect at midnight.

The e-mail also explained that “Listings from 5 cents to 9 cents will be grandfathered in for the time being.”

Saxe immediately tried to log onto his account to take advantage of the grandfather clause for his lower-priced keywords. “I was blocked from logging on,” Saxe said.

At 11:30 PM, Saxe said he was finally able to log on, but “They had already instituted the change.”

Saxe asked, “What kind of company notifies you at 7 PM that they are going to change their prices at midnight? But they had no intention of waiting until midnight.”

Overture doesn’t deny the charge.

The price increase was mentioned at Overture’s fourth-quarter earnings conference call Thursday afternoon, said Todd Daum, vice president of marketing at Pasadena, CA-based Overture.

An e-mail notice was then sent to Overture’s approximately 80,000 advertisers at once.

“The notice was given at the time the change went into effect,” Daum said. “At the time the announcement went out, there was no ability to change prices.”

Why not give everyone a week’s notice?

“The thinking was to tell everybody at once so there would be no advantage or disadvantage to one group over another,” Daum said.

On Friday, a perturbed Saxe complained to an Overture’s customer service supervisor that he was unable to change his bid the night before. He asked if his 9 cents and under keyword bids would be grandfathered.

“He said ‘no’ not very nicely, and I hung up not very nicely,” Saxe said.

But Daum insisted that the grandfathered clause is in effect.

Saxe spends between $500 and $600 a month bidding on Overture’s keywords. “This raised my costs by about 30%,” he said.

With Overture’s system, an advertiser bids a price (now at least 10 cents) for each of their keywords. Their competitors can bid higher, and the advertiser can then outbid them. The higher the price bid, the higher the placement on search results at search engines such as MSN, Yahoo and Lycos. Advertisers pay Overture only when a consumer clicks on their listing.

Overture reported net revenue of $667 million for 2002, which ended Dec. 31, 2002. This is a 132% increase from revenue of $288 million for 2001.