One of the reasons so much email is filtered at the ISPs is that they want users to have a good inbox experience. Earlier this week Yahoo announced they were providing users with the ability to collapse certain ads while reading email.
To give you more real estate to read your emails, we are adding a button just to the left of the advertisement in the All-New Yahoo! Mail. Clicking that button will hide the ad temporarily, while you read your email.
To me this is a real demonstration that they want users to have a good email experience. Not only is it about blocking unwanted mail, but they’re giving users the option to minimize ads. These are the ads that are making Yahoo money. As they say in their announcement:
Ads are what allow us to provide you Yahoo! Mail as a free service and hopefully they’re sometimes useful and interesting too. If you would like permanently disable ads you can sign up for Mail Plus which offers an ad-free experience and other enhanced features.
It will be interesting to see how this affects their ad revenue and how long this feature is available.
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My wife’s free @yahoo.ca account has been able to do this for some time; I wonder if she had been operating under beta mode or something.
Power to the recipient!
This is a retreat by the forces for intrusive marketing, not an advance for users.
Until just a month or two ago, it had been possible to close the advertising panel “permanently” (until your next browser session)