AT&T Tech Support 360Hooray! Yahoo Mail ditches tagline ads
Those annoying ads the Yahoo Mail has been appending to the bottom of e-mail messages soon will be a thing of the past.
Some at Yahoo apparently didn't like the taglines, either: this is the example the company used to illustrate how the ads can pile up.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo stopped adding the ads a few days ago, the company said on its Yahoo Mail blog on Friday.
Sounds good to me. Because the ads would be appended after each message, a back-and-forth exchange could lead to an accumulation of the pesky text lines like gradual accretions of soap scum.
I also never cared for Yahoo's text intruding into the content of my letter, which is much more presumptuous than a one-time display ad showing up in a separate frame in a Web page. I wasn't afraid people would think I was actually endorsing whatever product the tagline touted, but I didn't care for the idea of this dreck being archived alongside all those letters I sent my friends and family.
If you want to see how much of a clutter the ads have caused, here's one example: Google has tallied 18,700 instances of the "Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile" tagline in mailing list postings stored within Google Groups.
Yahoo, under pressure to increase its revenue, probably would like to sell every ad it can. But I suspect the tagline ads weren't that big a deal. The only ones I ever remember seeing had a more indirect potential benefit by promoting Yahoo services.
Stephen Shankland covers Google, Yahoo, search, online advertising, portals, digital photography, and related subjects. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered servers, supercomputing, open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen.
