"At some point

June 28, 2001 11:29 AM

"At some point Yahoo! will shift emphasis towards a billing relationship, that is as good as fact. What they need to decide, however, is whether to lead with a subscription or ISP model."
posted by grambo (14 comments total)

They had better not try any sort of pay-to-play relationship with their current set of features, because their service is abysmal. My Yahoo mail account crashes constantly and has dozens of bugs that have never been addressed, their services (news-by-email, daily new link listings, etc) have never been more than intermittent, most of their offerings are Mac-hostile, etc. There's no way I'd pay actual money for it.
posted by aaron at 12:03 PM on June 28, 2001

Agreed... Anything I do on Yahoo! right now could easily be replaced by someone else's free services. However, I think the larger picture is whether a changing business-model dynamic at Yahoo! will have a ripple effect on the rest of the web.
posted by machaus at 12:11 PM on June 28, 2001

I was on My Yahoo! the other day and noticed a link to a survey. I've been a faithful user of the service for years, so I decided to fill it out. I was surprised that most of the questions seemed to be of the "Would you pay for this?" type. Asking which magazines I get at home, would I want them to show up on My Yahoo, and what would I pay, etc. I answered pretty honestly that I wouldn't be willing to pay simply because I can get my information elsewhere for free. But obviously this marks the start of their exploration into other revenue streams...
posted by web-goddess at 12:16 PM on June 28, 2001

i've had my yahoo mail for 6 years, and except for occasional outages, i've never had any problems.

as opposed to my friend who has burned through 3 other free-mail services because of poor services.

still wouldn't pay for it tho. buy a domain and set up your own. and give out email addresses to your friends too. i can't find it at the moment but i found a complete (freeware) php web-mail application i am going to set up on my system.
posted by o2b at 12:21 PM on June 28, 2001

Lemme know what that is, o2b, and how it goes installing it. I'd be happy to give something like that a try too.
posted by MarkO at 1:11 PM on June 28, 2001

That is one of the many things which came preinstalled in my Cobalt Qube 3, which I'm now using to host my personal web site. I am not using it for email (yet) but I could, and I could let friends do so, too. I'd have to create Linux accounts for them, but the Qube comes with quite a lot of web-based groupware installed. (It also supports standard POP3.) It's actually a very nice package. I got the "business" edition and I consider it to be a bargain. Plug it in, do about ten minutes of configuration, and it's up. I was on the air with in within a couple of hours of its delivery by FedEx. The only upgrade I did (or plan to do) to it was to increase the RAM from 64M to 512M, which took about ten minutes.

Within three days I had UBBS and Greymatter installed on it, and within a week I had shifted my site to it (and kissed RR's server a not-so-fond farewell).
posted by Steven Den Beste at 1:50 PM on June 28, 2001

Honestly, I wish Yahoo were still the quality Web directory it was when I was in 6th grade, seven or eight years ago. It was a sad day when I finally deleted it from my bookmarks... viva ODP.

(Does anyone else find it odd that Yahoo's design has supposedly stayed the same since 1994, yet they keep adding more and more panels, advertising boxes, and buttons, creating an unholy clutter that would have reeked in '94? Jesus.)
posted by tweebiscuit at 3:10 PM on June 28, 2001

Id pay for access to content on Yahoo.. mostly the stock message boards and dailynews page.
posted by stbalbach at 3:58 PM on June 28, 2001

next big thing: boom of the small, private/by invitation, computing services provider? cheap but super-reliable long-term accounts....etc. e.g. Metafilter? maybe not. BTW www.washington.edu/pine/ is about to release webpine.
posted by greyscale at 4:20 PM on June 28, 2001

Some people never learn.
posted by JParker at 4:22 PM on June 28, 2001

I think Yahoo is one of the few companies which could pair with a phone company to create an effective rival to AOL and MSN. I hope they go for it!
posted by ParisParamus at 4:56 PM on June 28, 2001

I would pay for Yahoo. I love the What's New section. Unless I could find something like that section somewhere else for free. Anyone know of any?
posted by culberjo at 6:52 PM on June 28, 2001

Yahoo should merge with Earthlink. Earthlink is I think the nation's No. 2 ISP, but has no Value-Added type features to compete with AOL on anything but price, esp. with AOL/TW's new TW-Cable-oriented broadband push. Earthlink should merge with Yahoo, keeping the bulk of Yahoo free for everyone for now, but integrating certain things (My Yahoo, bill-paying, their version of Passport) with Earthlink accounts, and making some premium services only available to Earthlink users or people who pay a second subscription. Yahoo gets a (big) foot in the ISP/Paying-Subscriber market, Earthlink gets something to play against AOL/TW besides low price, better performance that comes from Messaging, stock data, other proprietary services.
posted by jeb at 6:55 AM on June 29, 2001

(Does anyone else find it odd that Yahoo's design has supposedly stayed the same since 1994, yet they keep adding...creating an unholy clutter that would have reeked in '94? Jesus.)

As opposed to the more recently-created worse clutter on other portals and sites? Seriously, Yahoo, perhaps, could use a redesign, but they believe strongly in a familiarity and uniformity-of-design.
posted by ParisParamus at 7:09 AM on June 29, 2001