There’s been a lot of buzz this week about announcements from AOL and Yahoo! regarding new email delivery fees. I’m sure that at least some of you use email, so I thought I’d post some thoughts on the topic.
My first thought is a simple one: boo/hiss. Let me be the first to call these guys commies.
My second thought, though, is that maybe this isn’t so bad
On the upside, this is a valid effort towards forcing sender accountability. Since the mailer will have to pay to ensure deliverability, they will be giving up some anonymity. On the downside, the model allows messages to bypass spam filters, so a clever spammer can pay, get their spam delivered, and then disappear again like a ninja in the night.
For those of you not familiar with the announcements, the free email services will be charging sending companies anywhere between $0.0025 and $0.01 per recipient for guaranteed delivery.
So, how does this affect you? Well, if you’re marketing via mass email, you may need to increase your budget slightly. But, if you’re sending a Happy Birthday email to yourGrandma@aol.com, you won’t notice a thing.
Kudos to the industry giants for finding another way to monetize a ‘free’ service. It’s going to be interesting to see if the added revenue outweighs their sure-to-follow loss of market share.
You see, when joesomebody@aol.com starts noticing that he no longer gets his Joke of the Day or Victoria’s Secret Sales Offers (because of the new cost), he may be tempted to jump ship and get a gmail account. And that means Google is one step closer to taking over the world.