Slashdot Mirror
Charging Does Help Yahoo Make A Profit
Meshach writes "The globe and mail has an article about how yahoo is starting to charge for their email service. Payment is not mandatory but if you don't pay you have many restrictions on your accont. It says that while many are angry about the change enough people are paying that it is helping Yahoo rebound from their slump. This seems like a recent trend in e-business." The conventional wisdom around web stuff that's been free, but converts to pay is that "they die off, no one wants to use it anymore etc etc", but I think what people fail to realize is that for many businesses, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying.
I hope that yahoo! does not have the same lax privacy policy for paying customers as for non-paying customers
I'm curious. What benefits does contributing to Slashdot give? Is it just the tingly feeling of helping them out? Lord knows, it hasn't raised the quality of the editing!
Does anyone still contibute?
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
" but I think what people fail to realize is that for many business, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying. "
Yes, thats the number one thing the dot-com business men and women must understand. You need paying customers in the dot-com industry just like everyone else, volume doesn't help one bit if no one pays anyway.
Does anyone think that this is unusual or unexpected? Many new businesses (whether drug dealers to that toothpicked chicken pushed in your face at the mall) include giving away samples (in yahoo's case email or other net service) and then making a premium version, weaning off the nonpaying, and incrementally trying to add on additional services for more money.
;-)
The problem of going from completely free to charging for the exact same thing is that is ticks off your potential customer base. Therefore the extra's (like Salon or Slashdot's elminating some ads) try to present a 'value added' aspect that makes the rubes reach for their Discover cards.
I'd only be really surprised if that wasn't a "Plan B" from day 1 or if there aren't more of these new billing plans in the future.
THis is too little too late..
Remember the egroups buy out debacle? Where Yahoo thought that it could buy out egroups and implement ads in every freakign group message and thought that would somehow encourage more people to use those groups and clik on the ads..
The only ones now that use free email are spammers and scam artists unless yahoo is willing to market to them to get the cash its too little too late..
Look at this way most isps offer web email access.. what does a yahoo email accoutn bring to the table in addtion to this...Nothing!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I don't understand why anyone would be willing to pay for e-mail access only. I always thought the use of free e-mail accounts was that they were "throw away" - you use them for sites that require an e-mail address, for posting online, or other situations when you don't want to give out your "real" e-mail address. When you start paying for access, that removes, imo, the only benefit of free e-mail access. Most ISPs also have online ways of checking your e-mail without actually setting up the incoming/outgoing mail servers.
If webmail cost money, wouldn't it discourage people from creating 5,000 addresses a day? Or provide some money to pay for the countermeasures?
Virtually serving coffee
I was very concerned about my email address... I had robertb@geocities.com from way before Yahoo! bought out Geocities. But as the spam increased more and more, the geocities.com/yahoo.com address became more and more worthless. The kicker was when some b*stard used my email address as the reply-to on a spam message... first my inbox filled with bounce messages, then with angry messages from recipients and sysadmins.
I changed my reply-to address to the email on my own domain, dixie-chicks.com, and after a few months, all mail from people I cared to hear from was coming to an email address I controlled. The economics are there:
* 12 euros/year (< us$15 even on a bad day) for a domain name from Gandi.net. If all you need is email forwarding, stop here -- they have it.
* 6 bucks/month for a web host like the one I use. Includes no-ad no-popup web space and unlimited web-based email addresses. Not meaning to plug, but they are reliable and cheap.
All together, it's worth $15 a year + $6 a month for a better deal and better service than I'd ever get from Yahoo!.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Yahoo is a company that is responsible to shareholders and therefore companies need to make a profit. I don't think it is the case of yahoo getting ppl on board for free and then whacking them with a 'pay or else'. Besides, are other 'free' services around.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
However, the catch is that free dry attracts the lowlifes. What happens is that seriously selfish moocher-types come in and split up their wash among 10 dryers at once. Other people get pissed off, some possibly because they wanted to pull the same stunt. Sometimes people even get into fights over this. Now the average guy who just wants to do a wash and dry and go home is thinking, screw this place. And he's the customer that the laundromat wanted all along, but now it's left with the worst customers.
So my friend, said, no way am I putting in free dry. The fact is, the lowlifes drive out the good customers. And businesses are very much concerned about keeping the lowlifes away while catering to the paying customers while staying friendly to the honest-but-not-yet-committed customer. It's a delicate balancing act, and businesses that try to extend themselves to attract customers (e.g., free e-mail) can get abused by the moochers, which can seriously affect costs and threaten the business. So when someone says, "you're going to piss off the people who are getting it for free," the answer will be, "if they were just trying to leech off me, then screw 'em. If they're a good customer, they will be willing to pay a reasonable price."
Yahoo is right to do this. They provide a service at some expense and have to recoup their costs.
... the more popular the data becomes, the more widedly it is distributed, the more available it becomes, all the while adding no additional cost to the providor. The cost instead is shared in tiny increments by everyone, in a barter system of essentially perfect effeciency.
... for there is nothing preventing a static copy being preserved on your own system, to be reloaded into the net when the old copy expires.
... greed seems to know no reasonable bounds these days, now that we've elevated it to diety status ... but the bar would be very low for hobbiests and enthusiasts to step in and offer a free alternative. Adopting such an architecture would go a long way in keeping the net free, in both senses of the word.
This is true of anyone offering a service. Now, perhaps the costs (e.g. for my own web page, http://expressivefreedom.org) is low enough that the cost is simply donated, but in that sense that cost is recouped from my day job.
The current client server architecture of the web (which BTW stands in start contrast to the underlying peer-to-peer architecture of the internet itself) places almost all of the cost burden on the publisher. The more popular a web site (or email service, or IRC server, or IM servcie, or what have you) the more bandwidth they need to buy, the more servers they need to cluster together, etc. They have no choice but to recoup their costs or stop offering the service, and if advertising is no longer sufficient (costs have outstripped that line of revinue), then customers will start to have to pony up.
But what is often ignored is that there are architectures where the costs are shared and distributed.
USENET was an early implimentation of this (still costly, because ALL the data is copied to ALL of the distributed servers), where everyone doesn't go to ONE server, they go to ONE of THOUSANDS. USENET still carries more data than any single website (even groups.google.com, which is merely an archive, not a stream of information).
FreeNet is a better implimentation, where data which is in demand is replicated to caches closer (in terms of routing metrics) to those wishing to see the data. The originating site bears only the cost of making the inforamtion available (and providing a small portion of their local drive and bandwidth to cache other unrelated data)
Restructure the web on a P2P basis, as FreeNet is doing, and you don't just get the Anonymouty and Uncensorability it was originally designed for, you get the scalability and low cost (regardless of popularity) of participation which the web in its current, client server form, will never enjoy.
FreeNet does dump old information no longer in demand (least popular, oldest first), a la USENET, but that is easily corrected by the one intersted in providing said information
Were Yahoo running on such an architecture, it is likely that their add revinues alone would be more than enough to cover all their costs, and there would be no need to begin charging for their other free services. They might choose to anyway
Unfortunately, there are powerful media interests who do not want to see a world of peers exchanging information, they want to see a new channel by which they can dump their dreck into our minds, while keeping us placidly on the couch where we belong. So, if such a change is going to occur (and with the release of FreeNet 0.5 the software is certainly available and usable), it will have to be because people like us, at the grass roots level, prefer an even playing field to the centralized, "read what we tell you" architecture cable companies, media cartels, Microsoft, and large content providors are tryig to foist upon us instead.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I have been a paying user for Yahoo mail for about a year now. This service has been around for a while...they are just branding it now.
I think the service is terrific. I get POP access (can't get that with Hotmail) and Yahoo's filtering for spam beats the hell out of Hotmail (which I think was designed to collect spam).
The interface is great and they continue to add features. If you don't want to pay extra for these features, then don't. You can still use the service...just not get the extended items.
Also, don't most people get free email when they get internet access? I think only the people surfing from public libraries would find this an issue.
The conventional wisdom around web stuff that's been free, but converts to pay is that "they die off, no one wants to use it anymore etc etc", but I think what people fail to realize is that for many businesses, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying.
I think it depends entirely on the service. Some are far more appropriate to being charged for than others. For example, I pay an annual charge for my e-mail account and I'm pretty happy with it, but I wouldn't dream of paying for websites. I think they should be funded by adverts.
The reasons are that
1) E-mail is ONE service, whereas there are *millions* of websites. You can't be expected to pay a seperate fee for each site. I don't want to, anyway. OK, a choice of paying to remove ads is fine as well.
and 2) Websites are a much more natural environment for advertising. If you receive your e-mail through POP or IMAP, you aren't going to see any banners unless they're sent to you (pseudo-spam). Ads can be integrated into websites and I *personally* have no problem with that.
But anyway, Yahoo! are keeping their free e-mail service; this one appears to be merely an additional service they're offering, no one seems to lose out much.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Actually thinking about it, one way for Yahoo to increase revenue is to disable the Bulk folder for the free accounts. Only enable it for the pay ones. The worst case for them is just lots of 6mb mailboxes full of spam. If they market it well they could lure people over to the "Spam Free" pay service. I am sure many users would be happy to get away from spam and be willing to pay for it especially if they use the Yahoo account as a primary email location.
Hedley
I once fired 7 customers... and my billable hours went up 35%. Now I was doing about the same amount of work, but was getting 1/3 more money.
Some customers are too expensive to keep if they keep getting a free ride. The 7 in question here kept turning in call backs on things outside the scope of work, and demanding that these items be "fixed" before they would pay for the previous work. Since it's my policy not to bill for work the customer doesn't accept, it was getting too expenseive to let these keep sucking on the tit. So it was Bubh bye for them.
One kept calling back, wanting more work done, and I finally told him that I felt that my competitor could better serve their needs. "But they won't come out to us anymore!" they said. "I won't anymore myself", I said.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
The uReach service started in ca. 1999 as a pioneer of sorts in integrating free e-mail with free voice mail, and gave each signup a toll-free number and extension for voice messages.
I signed up early on, and it didn't take very long to figure out that the actual quota (not alluded to in uReach's signup) was 30 MB. uReach's intention was to allocate most of the quota for voice mail, but that wasn't enforced, so my friends and I never used our uReach accounts for anything but e-mail.
The 30 MB space was so generous (five times that of Yahoo Mail, whose 6 MB was generous then) that for about two years my uReach address was my "only" address. At one time I had archived about 24 MB worth of stuff, mostly attachments. In addition to e-mail, I was using my uReach account as a dirty kind of file transfer and storage system.
Therein lies the problem for uReach. My friends and I were only a few of probably tens of thousands of uReach users who used the service for e-mail, file storage and transfer, and nothing else. uReach could not keep up with the increased usage and increased costs of providing the service. So eventually they had to start cranking the screws on its user base. First they yanked the toll-free access number, and I think the voice mail feature likewise disappeared. Then they offered a premium service with increased space (I think it was 100 MB!). Finally, they abruptly scaled back the free e-mail quota to 6 MB. So most of us who had 10, 15, or more MB of stuff on uReach were left in the lurch. Now I don't use uReach for anything except the occasional "yoo-hoo-I'm-still-here" login to ping the account.
Point is, it's simply taken Yahoo longer to arrive at the economic possibility that free e-mail services may not be free forever.
"Folks just call him Buckethead." -- Les Claypool
MicrosoftSucks.org is a fully functioning webmail service, with all the features any other service has. But unlike Yahoo, there's NO SPAM, no ads, no banners, or any other annoyances. It's completely free with no advertizing support. It's awesome. Plus you get an address @microsoftsucks.org, which is nice. :)
I think it's run by some linux philanthropist guy, because whoever runs it is obviously not making any money from it, since there's no advertizing or spam at all.
Repeal the DMCA!
The client-server model that the "old internet" has relied on is broken. The ad-revenue cycle is destroying quality of service, shutting down many good sites permanently, and we're losing vast quantities of content in the process.
The "old Internet" was funded by government and academic institutions, and commercial activity was forbidden on the backbone. Spam was nonexistent, nobody launched DDoS attacks and few people bothered to forge email addresses, though plenty knew how. Nothing was wrong with the old Internet; it just wasn't mainstream.
The "new Internet" has many more resources online, but we suffer the excesses of commercialism at the same time. Between spam and ad-supported websites, we are bombarded by as much advertising online as in the physical world, if not moreso. And, as in the physical world, we're tired of the constant advertising, and it's losing effectiveness. It's the "new Internet" that's broken, because the advertising business isn't working too well to support most online content.
Maybe it's time we find a way to actually pay for all this content we desire? I'm not sure how best to implement it, but if you were to take the costs involved with providing the most useful services, and divide those costs among the millions upon millions of Internet users, it would probably be fairly cheap on a per-user basis. Maybe it's time for the Internet to find a better way than annoying advertising to sustain itself?
I'm beginning to wonder if marketing isn't a bit like antibiotics -- useful in moderation (to find out about products you didn't know of but would want), but dangerous to overuse (because it generates resistance which makes it become generally lrdd effective), and it doesn't matter if some marketers restrain themselves, because the abusive ones can ruin it for everyone.
I believe the marketing profession has created for itself a Tradegy of the Commons. The incessant advertising on all fronts has lessened the value of all advertising. There's just too much of it. Some marketing is useful to the consumer; if they don't know that a product is out there, they can't buy it, even if they'd like it. Most companies, however, seek to shove their products down the consumers throats with a barrage of advertising. This is counter-productive, and it explains the ever-growing hostility people are beginning to feel towards advertising in general.
I don't see any easy solutions to this, but I have an uneasy feeling that this form of advertising-driven capitalism may be due for a major reckoning, and the results could be ugly...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay