Yahoo! To Offer Four Times More Free Mail Storage
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, March 24, 2005
Analysts believe the improvement is Yahoo!'s response to Google's move last spring to offer one gigabyte of free storage to users of its Gmail service. "What Google's Gmail has done is to kill any hope MSN or Yahoo! may have had of getting users to pay for mail storage," Kelsey Group analyst Greg Sterling said.
The cost of storage also has fallen significantly over the past year, according to Sanjeev Aggarwal, an analyst at Yankee Group. "Thanks to the arrival of serial ATA disks, the cost of one gigabyte of storage has dropped from $5 to 50 cents from a year ago," explained Aggarwal. "The lowering of this price point gives companies the opportunity to use storage as a lure for other value added services."
Users checking their Yahoo! Mail accounts make up about 40 percent of all Yahoo! page views, according to some estimates, and page views equal ad revenue. At 20.7 percent, e-mail accounted for a greater percentage of ad impressions sold on a cost-per-thousand basis than any other genre in February, according to Nielsen//NetRatings AdRelevance data. (Portals and search engines rated second at 16.6 percent, followed by general/national news at 10.7 percent.)
The storage upgrade will begin in late April, and will take about two weeks to complete, a Yahoo! spokeswoman confirmed.
Yahoo! is also beefing up antivirus protection for e-mail users, giving them the ability to remove viruses from attachments--a feature that had only been available to paying customers until this point, the spokeswoman confirmed.
Microsoft's MSN Hotmail limits free storage on its accounts to 250 megabytes. Yahoo! and MSN both offer two gigabytes of storage to users who pay some $20 a year for the premium service.
