Competition For Free Email

Next up in the World of Wonders competition: Yahoo! has just boosted its free email service, to stave off Google's Gmail.

Comments

[Eric II]

I woke up this morning to learn that the limit on my paid ($20/year) Yahoo! e-mail account had gone from 25 MB to 2 GB (no typo), with POP-3 access added along the way. Provided that the slow performance this morning isn't indicative of things to come, GMail and its text ads can wait, though an extra gig of storage space still doesn't sound bad.

[Eric II]

I woke up this morning to learn that the limit on my paid ($20/year) Yahoo! e-mail account had gone from 25 MB to 2 GB (no typo), with POP-3 access added along the way. Provided that the slow performance this morning isn't indicative of things to come, GMail and its text ads can wait, though an extra gig of storage space still doesn't sound bad.

[Eric II]

I woke up this morning to learn that the limit on my paid ($20/year) Yahoo! e-mail account had gone from 25 MB to 2 GB (no typo), with POP-3 access added along the way. Provided that the slow performance this morning isn't indicative of things to come, GMail and its text ads can wait, though an extra gig of storage space still doesn't sound bad.

[JSM]

I have had my yahoo email for 7 years now. Damn, time flies. The only time I will give it up is A)They begin charging me for the basic service, or B)They try to emulate Gmail.

[Xmas]

Email...the gateway application.

It's easy to see why the portals would be offering free email. Email is offered for free to get the kids hooked on their product. Then the push comes along.

"Oh, so you like that email kid. Why don't you try this picture hosting service? The first 5 megabytes of this is free. Do you like stroking your own ego by putting your lame ass thoughts and stories on the web? Try our blogging service. We have web hosting too, it's not too expensive."

Those internet addiction pushers! There should be a law!

[Jason Ligon]

"Do you like stroking your own ego by putting your lame ass thoughts and stories on the web? Try our blogging service."

Bwahahaha!

[s.m. koppelman]

Thing is, Gmail's inexplicably controversial advertising model justifies the cost of providing an account even to someone who uses their full 1 GB allotment. Google ads have pretty high clickthrough rates and generate pretty large bits of revenue per click. Gmail will probably be profitable in and of itself, and sustainably so for at least a few years; upsells to paid subscription services will be icing on the cake.

Yahoo's loosely-targeted banner ads, though? It's hard to see those generating enough revenue to make large-mailbox freemail services all that profitable. Yahoo's going to have to continue to rely on using their freemail to market paid subscription services for their current system to make sense. It's working for them, but it's a risky strategy with the price pressure from things like 1&1's $5/mo. dynamic web hosting accounts, ISP webmail, etc.

A Reagan-head dime says Yahoo Mail is going to try out Gmail-style contextual ads via Overture within 6 months.

[Madog]

Yahoo's simply trying to prevent their current users from switching to Gmail. Yahoo's offering 10x less space than Gmail, so it's not going to attract new users because of it. And really, given that Yahoo's storage space has been static while storage capacity of drives has increased greatly, there' not much extra cost. They just have to add a few more RAIDS to their system.

[John Beck]

At the same time, Microsoft's Hotmail service has been steadily necking down the services you get for free (and their paid service is still inferior to both Gmail & Yahoo's free versions). It'll be interesting to see if they respond at all.

I'm glad Gmail came along--its reversed a longtime general trend towards minimizing free web based applications.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Oh boy. I have a Yahoo account from which I have never, ever sent a message. Currently I get about 700 spam messages a week on that account. Good luck.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

I have two yahoo addresses: one for when I am forced to divulge an email address to do business (spam city), and one that I give out exclusively to friends and family. The "private" one very rarely gets spammed.

[nancy hess]

yes Gmail is simply best because the provides awesome service on Gmail Help Phone Number