Friday, March 03, 2006

Is Money the Way To Silence Annoying Messages?

By now, many of you have probably seen reports that America Online and Yahoo! have jointly discussed enacting a new “postage-based” system for Internet e-mail that would allow trusted messengers to be assured their e-mail arrives at its destination.

On the face of it, this sounds great. All of us have “in-boxes” that are swamped with spam and would love to have less of it. A technological solution is obviously appealing, because it eliminates the time-consuming chore of going through each message and deciding how to handle it.

While there will be considerable debate on this issue and how to best handle it, it brings up a broader point related to marketing messages. Companies like AOL and Yahoo, who both depend on the messages marketing and advertising generate for a large chunk of their revenue, risk devaluing those messages by charging, not for better or more costly content or other services, but for the right to exist without those messages.

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