Is Yahoo Mail worth nothing? I know that Gmail is the main email that people use for personal accounts but there are millions of people on Yahoo mail and have been for twenty years. I can't believe that is worthless.
The two questions I'd ask are what percentage of those millions of accounts are actively used and what their cost of providing the service is. I could easily believe that the costs of processing and storing all of that spam for people who switched to Gmail a decade or more ago are greater than the ad revenue from the percentage of users who actually login to the site.
I'm pretty sure Yahoo, before and perhaps after the Verizon acquisition, did more than one “use it or lose it” account purge, intended to sweep out zombie accounts.
I believe you’re right but I would still be curious about the number of people who logged in enough keep their accounts alive but not enough to make appreciable ad revenue. Disk isn’t _that_ expensive but it’s not free either and Yahoo! was never as good as Google at targeting so they can’t have had the best ad rates.
I was thinking the same about AOL. My cow-worker in the next cube still uses his aol email, as does an Aunt of mine. How to wring value out of it? is the question I suspect the VZ folks couldn't answer.
Not to ignore your point. IMO having been so thoroughly pwnd by various crackers over the years and with barely an apology to its users Yahoo Mail's surprisingly worth more than a liability, but less than a slap in the face with a fish.
