Clinging To Relevance, Yahoo Prevents Ad Block Users From Checking Yahoo Mail
from the ingenious-strategy dept
Yahoo's been struggling for some time under the leadership of Marissa Mayer to become as relevant in the advertising and content space as contemporaries like Google and Facebook. By and large these efforts have not been going particularly well, with the mood inside the company supposedly "grim and contentious," employees frustrated with a lack of direction, heavy often-senseless micromanagement, and a "lack of a coherent strategy." A growing movement from both inside and outside of Yahoo to replace Mayer has gained momentum.So as the company struggles for relevance this week in the face of users, employees and investors, somebody at the company apparently thought it would be a great idea to annoy a huge swath of the company's userbase. According to a growing number of Ad Block users, Yahooers this week were met with a message scolding them for using ad blocking technology and preventing them from accessing their mail through the website:
"At Yahoo, we are continually developing and testing new product experiences. This is a test we're running for a small number of Yahoo Mail users in the U.S."Really? You're barely clinging to relevance and you think it's a great idea to begin alienating the remaining customers that haven't fled to gmail? As we've noted many, many times, there are numerous answers to dealing with ad blocking, from designing less annoying ads, to developing new business models, to giving users more control. Instead, some websites have tried to dictate to consumers what they should do with their own browsers, and in some instances punished site visitors for even talking about ad blocking whatsoever. In Yahoo's case, the decision had the expected result. It started to drive users away:
"please disable ad blocker to continue using yahoo mail"
how about no. do you want me to stop using yahoo mail?? cause this is a good start
— Timmay (@RunLikeDeer) November 19, 2015So @YahooMail has blocked my inbox for using an ad blocker. It was a good run, I guess. Goodbye! Hello Apple Mail, as much as I hate it.
— Andrei Herasimchuk (@Trenti) November 19, 2015
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Filed Under: ad block, ad blocking, email, yahoo mail
Companies: yahoo
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Yahoo has it BACKWARDS
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Yahoo is not barely clinging to relevance
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Niche audience
So what to do? Yahoo isn't going to regain the number of users they lost. It's just not in the cards. And I'm sure the stock holders don't want to just give up and liquidate the company.
The only way for them to cling to what relevance they have is to do what this site CONSTANTLY suggest companies do (even in this very article), try a new business model! Yahoo, while possibly alienating some of their "mainstream" user base, is trying something NEW by going after a niche target audience. I'm sure all the S&M fans out there who just LOVE being treated like trash will be flocking to the new-and-improved, advertising mandatory, yahoo.com
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Re: Niche audience
That happened a loooong time ago. If this is how long they took to work out they needed to change their way of doing business, they deserve what they get.
"what this site CONSTANTLY suggest companies do (even in this very article), try a new business model!"
There's no evidence of a new business model, only evidence that they're trying to force people to see the ads that support their old business model.
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Aim at foot...FIRE!
The reason I have stayed with them this long is that my address is my real name with no stupid numbers following or other idiocy. That is how long I have had that account, and why I value it. On the other hand I don’t use it much and have other accounts with other providers for normal usage, and I don’t get several hundred spam emails weekly on those. Those addresses have nothing to do with my real name (live and learn).
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AT&T, Bellsouth, etc. email hosted at Yahoo
Auto-forwarding drops messages (many don't get forwarded on the intended destination), spam-filters can't be turned off (many false positives), several times the POP3/SMTP servers with expired security certificates.
Damn you AT&T for foisting your users off onto Yahoo!
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Skills required to be a CEO
Mayer made her name based on the simple design of Google. Has Yahoo been simplified? Exactly what has Mayer brought to Yahoo, except to annoy the employees with new policies? She certainly hasn't brought a new design to Yahoo. Was she really responsible for Google's simple design? Perhaps all she did was prevent Google from making its primary web page like Yahoo's, rather than impose a new design.
This is more support for the notion that to get to the highest corporate levels, skill is not required. What is more important is knowing the right people and happening to be in the right place at the right time.
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Re: Skills required to be a CEO
I switched about a year or two before that, when Google first came out, offering the world's first no-ad-banner search engine (a VERY big deal in the dialup era).
"This is more support for the notion that to get to the highest corporate levels, skill is not required. What is more important is knowing the right people and happening to be in the right place at the right time."
It's no secret that the higher up the corporate ladder (and the bigger the company) the more political skills and salesmanship matter. The part that is amazing is how often the people at the top are so detached from the rest of us. The "successful" ones live in their own bubble, surrounded by yes-men, feeling they're superior to everyone else.
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Re: Skills required to be a CEO
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Re: Skills required to be a CEO
Of course not.
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Re: Skills required to be a CEO
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Browsing the internet without adblock is like having sex with a hooker without a condom.
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Nov 23rd, 2015 @ 2:48pm
And then there's mobile where your bandwidth is often very limited so not having an adblocker is essentially paying to to see ads
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What are these ads you speak of?
Besides, logging into each account individually through a webmail site must be a gateway to one of the outer circles of hell.
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Re: What are these ads you speak of?
Everyone I know that relies on Browser based email access, sooner or later, has problems with receiving important emails.
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Probably the warning on the right side?
Anyway, as regards your question, I'm pretty sure it relates to some warnings I've been getting about an ad blocker. They pop up in the right side in an area that is probably supposed to get a Flash garbage of some kind.
Only problem is that I'm NOT using any ad blocker that I know of. Evidently something about my security settings is triggering a false alarm. Can't say I care a hill of beans, even though I still check my Yahoo email and it would cause me a tiny bit of inconvenience of Yahoo disappeared tomorrow...
Anyway, I want to focus on the positive side, something that Yahoo (or any of the large email providers) could do for better email: Give us tools to put the spammers out of business. Obviously not possible to eliminate all spam and all insane sociopathic spammers, but we could hurt them in their most sensitive and intelligent organ, their wallets. I really want tools to help disrupt ALL of the spammers' infrastructure, pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices, and even help and protect ALL of the spammers' victims. Insofar as many of those victims are corporations like Yahoo itself, it's kind of hard for me to understand "Live and let spam" as a viable business model.
Anyway, 'nuff said, but details available upon polite request.
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Re: Probably the warning on the right side?
This may not be compatible with the Yahoo business model. They provide two vital services to spammers:
So long as these are important parts of their business, I cannot foresee them making any effort to disrupt these things. I have not yet heard any suggestion that they intend to leave the spam and scam support business.
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Yahoo Answers:
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This latest "testing the waters" move should not surprise anyone, as they're counting on few people going to the trouble of changing their email address over a single annoyance. Yahoo long ago reached the stage of accumulating all the customers it will ever get. Once that point was reached, Yahoo's core business strategy has been trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of each user, rather than growing the company by offering things that attract new people.
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So Yahoo! can keep it's email for those dumb enough to turn it off. It just confirms that Yahoo! isn't for me.
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A Charitable Interpretation
Translation: "Management won't shut up about this, so we implemented a small-scale test just so we'd have irrefutable proof of what a stupid idea it is."
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But if Yahoo! shuts down...
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OT
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Re: OT
And then there were those who never even bothered to try out Outlook Express because Pine or Elm seemed good enough.
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I no longer use it and instead use Adguard which does what Adblock is supposed to do.
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uBlock Origin works better. You can't go wrong with a good Hosts file either.
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Evil did win.
Are they preparing for a career in politics?
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Re: Evil did win.
All this "leaning in" by incompetent executives who just happen to be female isn't doing much for the "movement." Then again, the Three Stooges who replaced Pao at Reddit have gutted the site even worse than she ever did during the summer purge.
The Disneyfication of Reddit to attract VCs and left-leaning celebrity Q&A clientele is reminiscent of Giuliani's fascist sweep of Times Square to get (tada!) DISNEY to invest in it and make New York the happiest little corporate-sanitized paradise on earth. This only makes Pao look like even more of an idiot, because she never saw the blindside coming.
But of course, all examples of bad management by quota hires can be chalked up to sexism or racism or cisgenderism or some other inane gripe from the perpetually offended identity-politics cohort. Just like ISIS isn't Islamic, Mayer and Pao's incompetence can only be because the Women Haters' Club in tech wants to ensure that the glass ceiling is made of concrete, right?
I'm a female who quit Reddit after the PC purge and ditched Yahoo years ago, and I think they're both pathetic.
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Many of its employees won't use the service (which should be a warning they know something we don't).
Those few who do are now blocked from their own account, as employees, since they use ad-block.
Yahoo has firmly planted itself in quicksand. By rushing to catch up to everyone else, it just sinks further into the hole.
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I can view my Yahoo email just fine with ad blockers
Maybe it's the fact that I'm using uBlock Origin instead of the typical AdBlock or AdBlock Plus?
Or maybe that it's technically an @Verizon.net email address that Verizon makes me login at Yahoo.com to access.
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Re: I can view my Yahoo email just fine with ad blockers
You're probably just not part of the trial group, but it will affect you if they don't heed the negative feedback.
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As of this morning, my Yahoo mail still working fine. Of course, if their check for Adblockers involves a script, the script blocker will eat it before it can do its damage.
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I've had my Rocketmail address since 1996, and I'm loathe to relinquish it.
I have Yahoo locked down into "classic" mode, (no widgets or extras, but it works!) no Flash and no Java, and Adblock running on every single site (except Techdirt!)
I've seen no change in my stripped Yahoo mail. Of course, it's barely more than a field of white and some text now.
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I think the moral of this story is that mega-corporations buying up mom & pop businesses end up destroying those properties. By gorging on smaller IP like a food addict at the buffet table, they make themselves so big and overvalued that they don't have to give a rat's tail about negative reactions from their customer base.
What I wouldn't give for the good old days of small and independent developers who acquired dedicated user bases through listservs and user groups like BMUG, and by offering demo disks in the back of Macworld and PC Magazine. But, alas, those were the good old days before the uber-corporatization of everything and the Eternal September. (The Internet one *before* 2001 -- ironically, around the time Yahoo went online.)
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You must subscribe to very different channels than I do.
"It's gotten to the point where cancer is more palatable than John Green's hysterical fan club."
I actually had to Google that name to find out that he was an author, although it seems I have heard of one of his books (because it was a movie, I'd never heard of the book before that was marketed). Maybe you should stop following teenagers.
"What I wouldn't give for the good old days of small and independent developers"
They still exist. Why not support them instead of watching videos about teen fiction?
"The Internet one *before* 2001 -- ironically, around the time Yahoo went online."
Yahoo went online in 1994. Your facts are consistently accurate, at least.
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Dont use adblock...use Adnauseam
http://adnauseam.io/
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I'll whitelist sites for those places that Limit the Ad's and other crap to something reasonable. Using Ghostery, I can block specific stuff on each web site. Allow only some of it and not the other garbage.
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RE: is an epic fail?
Ad blockers are for those who sold their souls to a extortion group (as happened with the owners of Adblock Plus)
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I'll make Yahoo a deal
First, I don't want to see flashing Flash ads with auto-playing music while trying to look through my inbox.
Second, I don't want a mortgage for 1% interest when no legit bank is offering interest rates this low. I also don't want smilies or toolbars.
And I also don't want Flash ads that create a buffer overflow and install a virus... which actually happened. I originally used Yahoo Mail on IE and one day while I was checking e-mail, ZoneAlarm starting altering me that something was trying to change the registry. It was either a coincidence that Yahoo Mail was open at the time or the ad infected my computer.
So, the bottom line is that I now use Firefox and AdBlock because I no longer trust Yahoo Mail.
Then combine that with Yahoo putting newsletters that I want into the Spam folder and putting spam into my Inbox.
I use my e-mail at too many sites and it would be a pain to switch to GMail.
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Silly Yahoo, Scripts Are For Kids
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Whocares
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The story starts all over again, now it's Verizon
Since a few weeks Verizon has a pop-up every time you open your yahoo mail telling you to stop using adblock and then switching you forcebly to a basic mail box with max 20 mails.
It rains complaints, but Verizon doesn't care. they obviously want to get rid of all yahoomail users world wide.
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Re: The story starts all over again, now it's Verizon
Small world coincidence? Or something fishy going on here? I basically stopped using this website a few years ago. I have not received any notifications. Until today.
Has anything changed during those years? Yeah, about two weeks ago I stopped by to see when I had stopped using the website. I read a book that mentioned some stuff from this website and I was curious to see if the references in the book overlapped with the time when I was active here...
Anyway, my comment posted above seems as relevant as ever. Now most active over on WT.Social...
As regards your new comment, it sounds like I've been doing the right thing by rejecting the new ToS each month. Also, I copied all of my old Yahoo email into an IPOP email system.
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