AltaVista 'express inclusions expiry' ripoff?

A client of mine received an email:

"Greetings from infospider! The AltaVista Express Inclusion (EIS) Program has changed! Welcome to the new Yahoo/Overture Site Match Program. In order to renew your URLs, please go to http://www.infospider.com and sign-up for the new Site Match inclusion program. The Yahoo/Overture Site Match program gets you Guaranteed rapid URL entry into Yahoo's global database, which includes Yahoo!, MSN, AltaVista, Alltheweb, Excite, CNN.COM, Overture, Infospace and many other major search engines, with an 85% reach of all internet users! The subscription period is for 12 months and includes 48 hour refreshes of your content!
"Go to http://www.infospider.com and sign-up for the new Yahoo/Overture Site Match program.
"Note: You can still access your EIS account and view existing URLs up to the end of the six month subscription period. However, you will not be able to renew existing URLs or add new ones."

The idea apparently being that he forks out $99 for what is a vaguely-defined service. For sure, I found the 'official' explanations poorly expressed, complicated, and unconvincing. It appears to be a mega-scam.

My instincts and research led me to one webpage which echoed my own misgivings, at

http://www.highrankings.com/archives/issue053.htm

"To me, the only real benefit of this program is in the fast inclusion upon submittal. You pay and you get in quickly. You don't pay and your site is put into purgatory for a couple of months. If you can't wait six to eight weeks, then pay the "bribe fee." But I surely can't see the benefit of signing on again when your time expires. I certainly hope that if you don't sign up with them again, that you won't suddenly find your URLs are missing. Cause that sure wouldn't be very nice, now would it?
"The other thing to think about when deciding whether or not to pay for AV inclusion is how much traffic you actually get from AltaVista these days. Years ago, AV was a terrific referrer and we used to see lots of traffic delivered to our optimized sites. Nowadays, I see very few referrals from AV. We have the same high rankings as in other engines, but hardly anyone seems to be searching from there.
"As I mentioned last week, for the most part, we only see traffic from Google, Yahoo Web Sites, Yahoo Web Pages (Google), and a wee bit from MSN. That's about it. There's the occasional traffic from AV or Excite or Lycos, but it's not worth writing home about. Given this, is it worth paying any of those search engines to be included in their databases?"

On top of which, as far as I can tell, there appears to be some sort of 'click-through' fee, which may only be 10 cents for every person who arrives at your site from AltaVista etc., and which may not amount to many (or even hardly any), but it looks like there's a $20 per month minimum fee anyway.

To my way of thinking, taking it at face value, Alta Vista (etc.) are setting themselves up as search facilities whose results are skewed by the willingness of participants to pay for inclusion. This to me - as an end user - means their search engine mainly reflects their interest in $$$, and not the relevance of any pages listed, and therefore their search engine is compromised and no longer worth bothering with.

This idea seems ill-conceived, messy and desperate to me. So on the whole, for now and until I find out any differently, I told my client to 'save your money and let 'em go hang themselves'.

Anyone got any better ideas?

No-one?
Lack of interest? Or is this really out of left field?