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Yahoo Denies Ad-blocking Users Access To Email (washingtonpost.com)

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-mail-for-you dept.

JoeyRox writes: Yahoo is running an A/B test that blocks access to Yahoo email if the site detects that the user is running an Ad Blocker. Yahoo says that this a trial rather than a new policy, effecting only a "small number" of users. Those lucky users are greeted with a message that reads "Please disable Ad Blocker to continue using Yahoo Mail." Regarding the legality of the move, "Yahoo is well within its rights to do so," said Ansel Halliburton an attorney at Kronenberger Rosenfeld who specializes in Internet law.

12 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. Awwww thats so cute by bazmail · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yahoo! think its a player. Good for you Yahoo!.

    1. Re:Awwww thats so cute by RogueyWon · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yahoo provides email services for quite a number of big ISPs. Certainly, the email services for BT (which is still, I think, the UK's largest ISP) are provided by Yahoo and just given a light BT-specific reskinning.

      So there might be quite a lot more people out there using Yahoo mail accounts than you would suspect. Some of them probably don't realise it themselves.

  2. To do list by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    1) Disable AdBlock
    2) Login
    3) Set forwarding to other email account / Send all mails to that address
    4) Logout
    5) Enable AdBlock

    Sorry, no profit, but the end result will be satisfactory.

  3. Legality? by Richard_at_work · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why would there be any question about the legality of this? Yahoo! doesn't have to allow you access to its service, and its now setting requirements to do so.

    1. Re:Legality? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Firstly, not all versions of Yahoo e-mail are free. (although they might be slowly shedding their paid offerings...)

      Secondly, a dismissive, "Why would there be any question about legality?" is something one only hears from people with no legal experience. The law isn't a codification of what you think the rules should be, and so many people have met their commercial demise by starting with the assumption that something is "surely" ok to do.

      Thridly, not every country subscribes to the neoliberal mindset, thankfully. It may be that some legal systems do not accept that someone can require consumption of promotional content except in regulated circumstances. This might especially be the case for services which have more than entertainment value and where loss of service might cause difficulty, e.g. having to change an e-mail address. This is why one asks legal experts rather than /.

    2. Re: Legality? by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's simple misdirection - people are asking, "is Yahoo being a dick?" and Yahoo is answering, "it's perfectly legal." Which has nothing to do with the question but many people will fall for it because they [somehow, still, inexplicably, despite all evidence to the contrary] still equate legality with ethics.

      n.b. It may be the users who are being the dicks, wanting something for nothing (#include malvertising.h), but that's not the question here.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  4. Go back by markdavis · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is going to go over like a lead balloon. I know if I was greeted with that on a site I use, I would then start the process of going elsewhere.

    They would do far better to just shift to some other way to display the ads using local servers instead of ad networks, if they really find all of this necessary. Oh, and in the process, make sure the ads are small, load quickly, don't pop up or under or on a time delay, have no animation and no sound, and no mouse over effects. Inotherwords, go back to the way things were before people found it necessary to block ads.

  5. queue the next level of ad blocking by DevilM · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Soon the ad blockers are going to be simulating that the user saw the ad without actually showing it.

  6. Well done Marissa! by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 4, Funny

    Marissa Mayer was an executive at Google. She went to Yahoo to get all their remaining users to move to gmail (why were they still using yahoo is an interesting question that's not in the scope of this post). Well done Marissa, we hope your bonus will be significant when you'll be back to Google.

    --
    Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
  7. Ads from yahoo has a bad rep. by fuzzyf · · Score: 3, Informative

    Did they forget this alreay?
    http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

    Or maybe they had an epiphany?
    CEO: "What do you mean some of our users didn't get infected?"

  8. All while adding ads ... by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm stuck with a Yahoo email because of my ISP. I tolerate it, but I'm not overly invested in it.

    I haven't seen the blocking ... if they do that to me I'll ignore them.

    But what I have seen is them adding to the number of ad-sites embedded in my email by quite a lot lately -- there's now almost 20 external domains they pull in which I'm blocking in just my email. I understand Yahoo is increasingly desperate to pretend they are relevant and to bring in revenue, but it's not my damned problem. I didn't choose to use Yahoo, my ISP made them my email because they didn't want to provide it themselves.

    So, Yahoo is something I use at my sufferance ... and my patience with them is growing thin.

    They're not that good, I don't use them for anything but that specific email that I'm supposed to keep for my ISP. They keep adding ad sites which I keep blocking. If they block me because of that ... well, they'll cease to exist to me, really.

    Yahoo is a company which really only lives on its own inertia of people who already have Yahoo accounts. Their painful decline into oblivion means they're being bigger assholes in trying to keep revenue.

    And when that backfires on them, they might just discover how irrelevant they've become.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  9. Re:Browser ends and a site begins? by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Another major reason is the speed. So many web sites are so much faster with adds blocked. I am not talking about small change, but something that is clearly visible.

    Right. Occasionally I'll see a "please disable your ad blocker" notice on sites that I like and that I use all the time. And I'll say, okay, that's reasonable, they have to make money to keep the lights on. So I'll disable the ad blocker and reload. Aaaand the site no longer loads, not even within (seriously) two full minutes. And so I say, if this is what it takes to keep the lights on, I'd be happier in the dark. So I turn the ad blocker off, and reload the same page, in milliseconds.