Article about Yahoo! eGroups decision to move ads back to the bottom of emails, after briefly putting them at the top, to much user protest. "'When anyone loses a list, that's tens of thousands of users,' [ListUniverse chief executive officer Chris Knight]
Knight said. 'This was a move to retain market position.'" The article mentions that Yahoo!/eGroups has "a fee-supported, ad-free premium service." What it fails to mention is that they actually discourage people from signing up for this option and paying them real cash money to use their service. Recently, I created a group for just a few people, for which I would gladly pay the $5/month to remove the ads. First of all, while I had heard of this option, I couldn't find information linked anywhere from the list admin section on how to do it. When someone finally pointed me to this page I was flabbergasted to find I couldn't fill out a web form and enter my credit card to be billed monthly, but that I had to fax or mail my information, along with my first year's payment. And, get this: "there may be a delay of up to two weeks depending upon current volumes." Oy. I can't imagine why they don't make this easier. Surely they make more money (at least on low-volume lists, which is the majority) from the $5 fee than the ads. What's more, they'd make tons of extra money from list owners who don't cancel the service even when a list dies down. What (even) more!: Once you're billing someone, it's much easier to sell them additional things that are small incremental additions to their bill ("want fries with that?"). Perhaps it was just one of those "yeah, we gotta get around to that" things at eGroups that, lordy knows, we all have long lists of. Perhaps now that Yahoo! is in charge, such a change is imminent. Perhaps not.
Knight said. 'This was a move to retain market position.'" The article mentions that Yahoo!/eGroups has "a fee-supported, ad-free premium service." What it fails to mention is that they actually discourage people from signing up for this option and paying them real cash money to use their service. Recently, I created a group for just a few people, for which I would gladly pay the $5/month to remove the ads. First of all, while I had heard of this option, I couldn't find information linked anywhere from the list admin section on how to do it. When someone finally pointed me to this page I was flabbergasted to find I couldn't fill out a web form and enter my credit card to be billed monthly, but that I had to fax or mail my information, along with my first year's payment. And, get this: "there may be a delay of up to two weeks depending upon current volumes." Oy. I can't imagine why they don't make this easier. Surely they make more money (at least on low-volume lists, which is the majority) from the $5 fee than the ads. What's more, they'd make tons of extra money from list owners who don't cancel the service even when a list dies down. What (even) more!: Once you're billing someone, it's much easier to sell them additional things that are small incremental additions to their bill ("want fries with that?"). Perhaps it was just one of those "yeah, we gotta get around to that" things at eGroups that, lordy knows, we all have long lists of. Perhaps now that Yahoo! is in charge, such a change is imminent. Perhaps not.