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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 think what people fail to realize is that for many business, less people is *just fine*, if those people are paying.
Hmm. Sounds like we're in for another harangue on the topic of Slashdot subscriptions in the near future.
I'd happily pay, if you guys would promise to use the money to buy some English as a Second Language courses. Maybe a spell checker.
--saint
" 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.
Why should you care about Yahoo's privacy policy? You didn't give them any real information, did you? I thought every Yahoo user lived on 1313 Mockingbird Lane in Beverly Hills, CA, 90210 and had the phone number 212-555-1212.
I write in my journal
I was sure that this was going to happen for years. Email is perfect for this -- high barrier to change. Get 'em hooked, then milk 'em.
However, I expected that Yahoo was going to offer better service. I would assume that IMAP support, Yahoo not selling your information, etc. would come with this.
There are better email providers, if you're planning on paying money. Take a look at the links on this page, ofr instance.
I expect MS will collect a lot more users on Hotmail from this...
May we never see th
This sort of stuff makes you miss the good old days when .com's weren't concerned with such trivial things like "profit".
Well, I for one am relieved to finally have the answer to what goes in the number 2 slot of all of those
/. I never was able to get that answer and was starting to feel like I was being picked on.
1. do this
2. ___________
3. profit!
multiple choice quizzes people keep posting on
this just in from the associated press:
a new study has confirmed that by charging people, you can get money. this revolutionary new business model is being adapted to other businesses around the world as we speak.
"I just want to thank my coach Eric a.k.a. Disco for shattering my reality..."
My E-Mail address is far too important for me to lose it. The address didn't change the last 3 years, and I would be happy not to change it in the near future.
My problem is that the address is from a Freemailer service (GMX). So if they start to charge for their mail service, and I want to keep my mail address, I will have to pay.
I think that's true for most people using Yahoo's mail service.
Two Worlds - One Sun [Spirit]
Once again, another overreacting FUD piece on Slashdot. If you read the article you will see that all they are doing is raising the price of their ALREADY pay per use "Yahoo Mail Plus" service, or whatever the name, from 19.95 to 29.95. They are also adding some new features to it like the ability to send email for different domains. They are not "taking away" anything from the standard Yahoo mail service, even though the article tries to paint it that way, by saying that "customers are restricted to 4MB in their inbox", etc. There has always been that restriction on inbox size, and nearly ever WebMail provider has a simmilar restriction. If they didn't then they'd all just become free warez repositories!
Right now all a subscription gives you is ad-free pages. But, honestly, yes, I think for most people who have paid, myself included, the main motivation is some form of loyalty and desire to help out.
:)
Slashdot definitely has its annoying faults, but there isn't a single website I spend more time on than Slashdot. Sometimes I find myself reloading the front page only a minute after I last viewed it. I am probably the kind of user Slashdot normally hates (frequent reloader), so I am only too happy to pay my share. I'd rather lose $50 than Slashdot, even with all its faults.
Jason.
I wanter her to change for a several reasons.
She was on Netscape mail. It sucks over there! No filters, no checking pop mailboxes, spam up the wazoo, and no customiztion. I could send her a message, and she couldn't find it, buried under all the other messages.
Yahoo is good for people who like their own 'space'. You can change up the background, theme, and mail folders - Netscape had no options whatsoever. She now is changing settings all over, and customizing stuff like crazy. This is good, because she's getting less of a 'I hate computers' attitude, and more of a 'This is cool!' attitude. (Every little bit helps ;)
With all the Klez and its ilk, nothing like having all that NOT on my local machine. I don't have to worry about if Norton got his coffee today. Outlook finally doesn't matter since I can check a couple of pop mailboxes too.
Yahoo is making constant visible improvements to the mail system, making it easier to use, spam free, and nicer to look at.
I recommend it highly. And I'm just using the free service!
Now, the Yahoo Groups on the other hand, parcel info out like its methadone. It makes navigating to find a nugget of what you're looking for into a painful experience. I try to avoid YG and Geocities pages whenever possible.
The mail is where its at.
The last one is why I choose to go with Yahoo!. My college email account will one day go away. I don't want to use (can't really) my work email for personal correspondence. I'm likely to move around the next couple of years, so my ISP will probably change (so there goes my ISP email account). There are other free email services, but none are as established as Hotmail or Yahoo!. And that's what it came down to. I wanted an email address that I could give out and not worry about it changing in a couple months, or even a couple years. If I decided to move to anywhere in the world, I would still have my Yahoo! email account. None of my other accounts have that stability. Few other online email providers can guarentee that kind of stability. Of course, Yahoo! could go out of business, or could sell off the email business, but that's a risk regardless of what I choose.
Additionally I find that Yahoo!'s spam filter works fairly well for me (better than Hotmail), it's interface is more lightweight than Hotmail, I can even access it via a links or lynx web browser. You can change your privacy policy settings so that you don't get spammed or sold out and the service is always up. I made the decision several months ago and I haven't been disappointed.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
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
In a world full of companies like Microsoft, yahoo isn't really that bad. When I first moved out of my parent's house, I needed a new e-mail address, and one that would stick with me whenever I changed ISP's. I found out that yahoo provided free POP3 access (this was 1999 or 2000, btw) so I went with them. I was able to get a short, easy-to-remember e-mail address, with free POP3.
So I was happy.
Whenever it was that yahoo first announced they were no longer offering free POP3 access, I wasn't put off. I know many people were, but really, it was like 10 bucks per year; even my broke-ass can afford that.
True, yahoo mail has a SLEW of spam. But they also add a header XYahooFiltered Bulk to each message with their proprietary filter deems as spam. I've been able (quite easily) to configure Mozilla mail and Evolution to filter based on this header, and dump all the spam in the trash. It works like a charm.
We dance to all the wrong songs.
--Refused.
I hope that yahoo! does not have the same lax privacy policy for paying customers as for non-paying customers
.com's, as the majority of them relied on advertising for revenue. (except sites like e-bay, etc. who are doing fine in this kind of environment).
The really interesting part of all of this is that when Yahoo first started, thier service was exemplary. They were effecient, thoughtful, smart, and they implemented a host of useful resources.
Then, like the vast majority of the dot-com companies, the VCs and big-business types pulled the wool over the eyes of the original founders(people like Jerry Yang). Or, put another way, the original founders sold out. After that happened(about 1 year before the dot-com crash) Yahoo's service has continually degraded. That's about 2 years of constant monotonic degradation of service. Now they're insisting on customers paying for a service that was taken for granted 2 years ago?
Understandably the dot-com business model has all but evaporated in the face of diminished advertising revenue. (Ad companies are paying 1/10th what they used to per ad). This coupled with the fact that the stock inflators have all left town or gone broke, pretty much means that Yahoo has very little to go on. This of course is true of almost all the
It's very unlikely that any of this will change, as consumers are more and more fervently seeking out products that will block advertisments. The latest batch of "pop-up" style advertising techniques has pretty much buried any respect the advertising industry ever had in the mind of the consumer. Said another way, advertisers are paying less and less per ad because they percieve how ofter those ads are being avoided. In turn they insist on "eyeball time" and make even more hostile ads. This in turn increases the consumers anger, and the customer finds even more effective ways to block out all advertisements. It's a cycle that bears very little hope for the advertisement based web-business model.
I would suggest that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But it requires the vast majority of us to embrace 2 distinct technologies. Wireless broadband, and Peer-To-Peer file-sharing, HTTP, and computing.
Those are big hurdles, but in conjunction they appear to be within our grasp:
1) Wireless broadband means buying a dedicated commodity unit for ~$150(before prices drop) that will provide 10Mbps 24/7(does your telco/cable co offer this?). Most importantly, there is no monthly cost...goodbye $50/month to Bell X.
2) P2P transfer of not only files, but also dynamic content like webpages. This would involve a dramatic paradigm shift away from the current client-server model. But with > 100 10Mbps nodes per square-mile in urban areas, and intelligent caching, there's every reason to suggest this is possible.
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.
Currently 99% of the server load is on 1% of the connected machines. Leaving the other 99% of the client base Idle. A small investment of ~$150(about the price of a 2nd harddrive, or a new soundcard) could change all of this. Then those 99% idle client boxes could become very powerful P2P nodes.
This is not the distant future folks, it just takes a catalytic moment to get everyone to buy that 802.11X card. It happened to CD-ROM drives, sound-cards, etc. sooner or later a new standard component is adopted. Then the folks at Dell etc. will include one in every standard box they sell. Hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later. Then the OSS/private sector can build HTTP over P2P(challenging, but not impossible within this infrastructure).
I'm sincerely hoping all of this happens soon, because many great web-sites are going down, and we're losing a lot of good content. There's less and less in that Google cache every day, and we need to change that.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky