Yahoo Terminates Tagline Ads
At the end of last week, Yahoo quietly took a step to improve the experience of untold millions of e-mail users: It stopped sticking one-line advertisements at the end of messages sent from its free Yahoo Mail Web e-mail service.
The company announced the change in a cheerily sarcastic blog post:
You've almost certainly seen them before, but as of a few days ago you won't be seeing them again. Tagline advertisements (which were inserted at the end of email messages) were comprised of short messages for a variety of products, but are now comprised of nothing!I for one am going to particularly miss the frequent Yahoo! Mobile ad (which replicated on each reply in a thread) encouraging folks to "be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all" with Yahoo! Mobile, but I suppose I'll learn to cope.
I'm glad somebody at the company had recognized the silliness of these repetitive, eminently ignorable one-liners. The only time I ever paid particular attention to them was when I chose to post my reply to a message below the original text, in which cases I felt obliged to delete the tagline for the sake of neatness.
With Yahoo and Google's Gmail now delivering messages free of tacked-on ads, Hotmail and AOL (which has even stapled taglines to the outgoing messages of paying users) now look seriously behind the times.
Have you ever acted on any of these one-line ads? Can you even remember the contents of the last one you saw?
By Rob Pegoraro |
May 19, 2008; 12:12 PM ET
| Category:
The Web
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Posted by: Ryo | May 19, 2008 1:05 PM
Those ads (though I can't tell you the last one I saw) were one of my main reasons to subscribe to .Mac to get IMAP e-mail on my iPhone a year ago (Yahoo had an agreement with Apple to provide free, "push" IMAP to all iPhone users, but the e-mails came with a couple annoyances -- all of them now rectified by Yahoo. Namely, taglined advertisements, not being able to use the IMAP on a desktop, and storage contraints). But for now I'll stick with .Mac (and hope for "push" mail soon).
But three cheers for Yahoo mail users -- still the No. 1 mail provider world-wide -- they can now peel the bumperstickers off their digital foreheads
Posted by: Brendan West | May 19, 2008 2:11 PM
Years ago I made the decision to subscribe to Yahoo Plus for a few reasons, particularly more storage space and no tagline ads. However, now that Yahoo is systematically removing those hurdles, the value of the Plus service has diminished. I'm not sure what will actually happen if I let the subscription lapse.
Posted by: slar | May 19, 2008 3:37 PM
Slar, I'm in the same boat. I've essentially stopped using my Yahoo! account (despite the relatively small Plus payment) on account of how much spam I get there. The only reason I still hold on, at the moment, is b/c of all the webregistrations I have keyed to it.
The Plus part gets us POP3 mail forwarding. Without it, it's tough to extricate yourself from Yahoo!'s clutches.
Posted by: Bush -- not related | May 19, 2008 4:32 PM
Hooray!
At AOL, I fought tooth and nail against the idea of modifying the e-mail of paying customers. It's just... evil.
Ever since GMail, I've assumed I was wrong. Now I see I was just decades ahead of my time.
Posted by: Jay Levitt | May 21, 2008 2:42 PM
I feel a lot better knowing I'm not the only one who deleted those tags for the sake of neatness!
THANKS ROB!
Posted by: LALA | May 22, 2008 2:34 AM
im sory
Posted by: Anonymous | May 24, 2008 12:01 PM
volam.com.vn
Posted by: huu_a | May 24, 2008 10:50 PM
xin cho há»i có phải củ hà nh trồng rahoa lan
Posted by: *attuan | May 26, 2008 5:41 AM
140
Posted by: moslhy | May 26, 2008 2:09 PM
ju la gj`?
Posted by: tuananhcx | May 31, 2008 6:55 AM
The comments to this entry are closed.
I've never paid attention to those ads. I always wonder if yahoo actually got paid for putting those ads there since I really doubt anybody ever read it.