Competition Doesn't Stop at Free
from the good-for-yahoo dept
Good news for consumers as Yahoo announces (via Rob Pegoraro) that it's dropping those annoying ads it appended to Yahoo Mail customers' outgoing emails. The move brings it into parity with GMail, with Hotmail and AOL now looking like laggards. This illustrates a point I made last week: competition doesn't end when the price of a product gets pushed down to zero. Some websites seem to think they're doing their customers such a big favor by giving a service away for free that they're entitled to bombard their customers with annoying ads. But smarter companies have figured out that when they can no longer compete on price, they start competing along other dimensions, like convenience, speed, and features. Paring down the number and intrusiveness of ads is just another way that companies increase the value of their offerings to consumers. Indeed, we've argued before that one of Google's key strengths has been its willingness to change its products in ways that improve the customer experience even if doing so reduces their short-term revenues. That has paid off in the long run for Google with an enhanced brand image and strong customer loyalty. Yahoo seems to be learning that lesson and realizing that it's in its long-run interest to improve its users' experience even in ways that might hurt its bottom line in the short run.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: business models, competition, economics, free
Companies: google, yahoo
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Facebook...
Since changing my status to 'single', I've had ads for 4 different online dating agencies!
It's kinda relevant but tangental
~Because I can
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Facebook...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
On the other hand...
First, can't they (Yahoo) make a decent spam filter? How hard is it to tell the e-mails server that any message with the subject of "viagr@" is spam and belongs in the Spam folder (or deleted completely).
As a user, I can't create a new filter to move it since I used all 15 filters years ago. I also can't add the sender to my "block list" since I filled all 500 slots years ago. Plus, we all know spammers change their e-mail address, so blocking 1 e-mail won't work.
When I log onto Yahoo Mail, I get taken to a page with news, sports, entertainment, and such. Um, I'm checking mail. The url is mail.yahoo.com. Why the **** am I not in my Inbox? Why am I seeing news? If I wanted news, I'd go to the main Yahoo page.
Yet there's not option to change this "feature".
Yahoo also changed their setup so I can no longer "forward as attachment", which means I can't forward spam messages to places like SpamCop.
And after using my Yahoo account for years, I can safely say that clicking the "Report as Spam" button does almost nothing. But, "report as spam" is not going to stop spam: at the most, Yahoo will simply move the messages to the Bulk Folder. This doesn't exactly help the fight against spam.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]