• by Mark Naples , February 10, 2006

I've been following the fallout from the AOL-Goodmail announcement pretty closely--but I still can't get past my first intuitive barrier. Although AOL has since retreated from its initial announcement, and announced that they're going to continue using their Enhanced Whitelist alongside Goodmail, it's seemed to me from the start that the wrong people would be hurt by such a postage-ish system as what Goodmail represents.

Then I got the e-mail that crystallized the whole enchilada for me.

It was from Heather Stephenson, an old friend from the industry. Heather currently runs Ideal Bite, (www.idealbite.com) a site and service that shows consumers ways they can become more "green" while entertaining them by "showing how you can easily align your daily decisions with your personal values." It's not a preachy site or service--in fact, it's quite modest. Think Daily Candy for the people who drive their SUVs to Whole Foods. But, it's cool enough to have garnered 35,000 double opt-in names completely organically in its first six months from consumers seeking e-mail tips on a regular basis.

Fact is--there's nothing not to like about Ideal Bite, a good idea with a great privacy policy. These guys would sooner stick an organically-grown hay needle in their eyeballs before they would sell anyone's e-mail address.

So Heather wrote, "I'm wondering how you feel about this AOL e-mail fee situation and Goodmail. Does this sound like triple-dipping to you? Think about it: 1. AOL charges for their monthly service to get your AOL address; 2. AOL charges their advertisers to place ads on AOL and in the AOL e-mail space. Plus, they take a rev share from purchases made in their shopping section; then 3. with Goodmail--they charge companies and individuals who send transactional e-mails as much as a penny for the privilege of delivering each e-mail to their already-paying customers' inboxes? Tell me they're kidding and that some other shoe is going to drop here. Please?"

Heather was on a rant. But, she wasn't wrong to be. This announcement is rant-worthy. The AOL-Goodmail cabal is, well, preposterous. To someone small like Ideal Bite, this implies an AOL-only postal fee exceeding $125,000 each year--a significant bite from the annual revenue of this startup company today. What will happen when their media asset-- their db of loyal, double opt-in users--is 3.5 million? That makes their annual bill $12.5M. Now you get the idea--this is real money. I know that this assumes all their subscribers are AOL users. But, many media companies rely on the AOL users for tons of business while maintaining databases in excess of one million AOL profiles.

Does anyone think that AOL or Goodmail cares whether or not this fee filters out the kind of nonsense spam that promises to enlarge your body parts? Please close the e-mail that delivered this column right now if you think that AOL or Goodmail is primarily hoping to protect you from the intrusion of the alerts that someone has illicitly accessed your PayPal or eBay account.

Kids, this is about revenue. This isn't about spam protection. A division of one of the largest media companies in the world has figured out how to (maybe) position itself at the vanguard of privacy and consumerism while making a buck (okay--a lot of bucks).

To my thinking, there are two perfectly ironic things about this plan of theirs. One is that they're employing a system that has kept our postal rates low while keeping our mailboxes filled with catalogues and "junk mail" that - frankly - doesn't really bother as many people as you might think, according to studies. For some reason, and we can guess at that, Spam bothers people far more than the junk mail that credit card companies' and your local supermarket's sale of your personally identifiable information (PII) spawns.

Two is that AOL's is the most pop-up-laden, monetized user interface that has ever existed. Not so many of the people who read this column are AOL users, I should think. But, when you get a chance, take a look at that main page and count the ads --including the really intrusive ones. This isn't a company that seems to care so much about protecting the consumer. It cares far more about driving revenue.

This Goodmail deal and its well-schemed announcement is good positioning, especially for anyone who doesn't understand our business. But, it's bad business. In the short term, it's bad business for companies like Ideal Bite. In the long term, it'll be bad business for AOL.

If you disagree, let me know on the Spin Board. But please, before you do, ask yourself whether or not you get more junk mail than personal mail from the U.S. postal service. We all know that spam comprises a lot of the e-mail received in the U.S. by consumers. E-mail authentication is vital - no doubt. But, I've never heard anyone say what the real harm is from consumers having to delete spam from their inboxes. How much do you mind throwing out credit card solicitations or catalogues that come in the U.S. mail?

The proliferation of phishing has changed some of this, to be sure. But, identity theft happens far more from offline means than from online means. ISP postage systems will create more problems than they solve--especially for the people and smaller companies that can make our medium's growth sustainable in the long term.